phyllis rodriguez

Phyllis Rodriguez’s daughter pushed her to make her famous strawberry jam while she was recovering from an illness about eight years ago.

The batch tasted so good that she decided to enter it at the fair, and Rodriguez won a first place blue ribbon.

That was Rodriguez’s first entry into the fair.

“All it takes is one ribbon, and it hooks you,” she says.

Now she enters cookbooks and salt-and-pepper shakers in the collections competition. A blender cookbook from 1932 is among this year’s entries. Her cookbooks usually win ribbons.

She also entered salt and pepper shakers in the likeness of babies in diapers.

“My son had a baby this summer, and my daughter had a baby last year,” she says.

Kathy Rohrer thinks about the fair all year. Once it’s over, she’s planning for next year. She practices her recipes and tries things out on her friends.

She has entered jams, jellies and canned vegetables in the creative arts contest every year for the past 15 years.

Every year, that is, except this one.

Rohrer visited a friend in Seattle the week before the deadline to submit fair entries. On the Saturday she was to fly back to Dallas, an August thunderstorm here caused her flight to be canceled.

“No flights were available on Sunday because everybody goes home on Sunday, and that was the final day to bring things in,” Rohrer says. “I had it all ready, and when I called them, they had closed the books.”

So her fruit cocktail, cucumber relish and peach barbecue sauce will go unjudged this year.

The Hutchinson, Kansas, native grew up going to the Kansas State Fair, where her mom used to enter the knitting competition. She started entering the State Fair of Texas after her Aunt Neva, who was in her 80s, died, leaving Rohrer her plastic bag full of canning recipes.

“I started screwing around with her recipes, and I figured I would find some mojo,” Rohrer

She’s kind of superstitious about the whole thing. If cucumbers, she assumes they will make her lucky, for example.

Rohrer has won ribbons every year she has entered.

That could also be because she’s exacting. One year, she won a blue ribbon for canned green beans, which are judged solely on how they look in the jar.

“I spent hours measuring each bean and putting them in the jar just so,” she says. “I thought ‘if anyone saw me doing this, they would think I am crazy.’ It was so much trouble, but I won.”