bob reagan

Bob Reagan’s New Year’s Day tradition with wife, Martha, is to watch the sun rise near the Spillway at White Rock Lake. They’ve been doing it for about 15 years, and afterward they have breakfast at John’s Café.

That serene New Year’s sunrise over White Rock is depicted in Reagan’s photo contest entry at the fair this year. Last year, he “won” a green participation ribbon for his photo of the February 2011 ice storm, and he hopes to score a more exclusive color this year.

“I saved my pennies to buy a Leet reflex camera, single lens,” while still in college, he says. “And it’s always been a hobby.”

While walking the Creative Arts Building a few years ago, he says, he realized that his pictures were good enough to compete. So he entered the following year.

Nineteen-fifty-two, the year Big Tex debuted, was the first year Reagan attended the fair, or so his mother tells him. He grew up in the Love Field neighborhood known as Love Dale Addition and attended Jesuit High School. He was a Dallas police officer in the 1970s and went through the police academy at Fair Park, when it was there. He remembers riding the monorail and the old Swiss Sky Ride at the state fair.

He missed a few years of the fair while in law school in Houston, but that’s where he met his wife. They went together when they were dating.

“She can’t wait to go to the fair every year,” he says.