After 45 Years, SWW Fair Maintenance Supervisor Retires

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Forty-five years ago, Bob Sobolesky needed a job. 

He took a one-year gig with a contractor helping to restore the Southwest Washington Fairgrounds after the 1972 flood. Five floods and nearly a half-century of fairs later, Sobolesky ended his run as the fair’s maintenance supervisor last week, stepping into retirement after a career filled with memories and challenges. 

“I met hundreds of people who I call friends,” Sobolesky said at his farewell get-together Monday. 

Dozens of colleagues and local officials gathered to wish him well, deliver cards and mementoes and share stories of his tenure. 

“Bob is definitely an institution,” said Centralia Mayor Lee Coumbs. “He also took control of things very easily. The time that I knocked a fire hydrant off the day before the fair opened, he told me: ‘Don’t you drive tractors again.’”

Sobolesky had plenty of stories of his own. Like the time he got pulled out of Willie Nelson’s concert at the fair to help fix a broken safe.

“Somebody broke the handle off the safe, and Willie Nelson needs his money,” Sobolesky was told. “He wants cash money. He don’t want no check.”

Unable to work the safe open, he wrangled it onto a pickup with the help of a couple of his staff and some members of the Lewis County Sheriff’s Office. They hauled the safe to his shop, where Sobolesky cut it open with an acetylene torch. Nelson got his money — even if the cash smelled like “it was ready to ignite” — and the deputies looked the other way at the smells emanating from the singer’s tour bus. 

“He knows every nook and cranny of this place, and he's probably repaired or remodeled every nook and cranny of this place,” said Pat Slusher, the fair’s marketing specialist. 

Stepping onto the grounds, Sobolesky painted a mental picture of a fairgrounds very different than the one that stands today. Gravel areas that are now paved, pavilions that are now full-fledged buildings, new restrooms and stages, the work of four and a half decades at the fair. 



“The biggest challenge we took on was flooding,” he said. “There were several times that we didn’t think we were gonna recover.”

In 2007 — the “big daddy” — Sobolesky and another worker watched from the office on the fairgrounds as the water began to rise. Based on predictions, they didn’t expect it to get more than 2 inches deep inside the building. Soon, they were standing on top of the desks as water filled the office, with levels reaching 7 feet deep outside the door.

“They had to get the Coast Guard helicopter in to get us out of here,” he said. 

When the waters receded, Sobolesky was back to get the fairgrounds into shape, just as he had with every previous flood. 

“Every flood has brought new changes,” he told the group assembled for his farewell. Choking up a little, he added: “It’s been my pleasure working here, and I’m going to miss it.”

According to Slusher, Sobolesky is the longest running employee in the history of the fair. 

“It's more than a job for him,” Slusher said. “Bob has always been, underneath it all, concerned with how everything turns out for everybody. … You have to like fairs. Not everybody makes it through more than a few.” 

Sobolesky likes fairs, all right. His retirement plans include helping out at the Skagit County Fair and the Stanwood-Camano Community Fair. And he’ll likely be around in August when the livestock and elephant ears and rides show up in Lewis County. 

“I definitely have an interest in it, and a lot of the people who are still here,” he said. “You’ve got to rekindle the fires every once in awhile.”