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WLS Radio’s National Barn Dance aired on Saturday nights, broadcast from Chicago. The show started in 1924, and featured music, comedy, and skits, playing before live audiences.

The show in Bicknell was on the opening night of the fair. There were two performances, at 7:30 p.m. and 9 p.m., on a stage decorated, of course, as a barn scene with straw bales set up on Hooper Field. Fifteen people made up the show, but the featured entertainers were Pat Buttram, the DeZurik Sisters, and the Prairie Ramblers.

Some 1,500 people attended the first show, seated on both chairs and bleachers. This is how “The Bicknell Daily News” described what the audience saw: “Pat Buttram and his hillbilly and cowboy and cowgirl artists yodeled, danced, joked, twanged guitars and mandolins, tooted jugs and rattled bones in entertainment that held forth throughout the evening.”

Today, most people remember Pat Buttram for the character Mr. Eustace Haney that he played on the television show “Green Acres,” the comedy which ran on CBS from 1965 to 1971 (where he was joined by Vincennes native Alvy Moore). Prior to his work on “Green Acres,” Buttram was best-known as Gene Autry’s sidekick, both in the movies and on television.

In their Aug. 8, 1939, edition, the Bicknell newspaper certainly presaged Buttram’s later success, writing that the entertainer would be “one of the most fortunate of radio performers when television becomes a reality. For this slow-spoken Alabama gentleman is a true stage performer and even when working in a broadcasting station acts his lines out as though he were before an audience.” The paper went on to describe Buttram’s delivery as reminiscent of the late Will Rogers.

The DeZurik Sisters, Mary Jane and Carolyn, raised in rural Minnesota, became known for their unique style of yodeling. The sisters were popular with the fair audience.

The singing group and recording artists, the Prairie Ramblers, also took the stage that night with singer Patsy Montana and were a big hit.

Besides the WLS Barn Dance performers, other features of the fair that year included Jack Kurkowski and his Xylophone Band, from Richmond, an amateur boxing show, and horse and mule pulling contests. The saddle horse show on Friday night brought out more than 2,500 people. In addition, there were free acts on the midway throughout the week.

The revived Knox County Fair broke attendance records that year. On opening day alone, there were 3,974 general admission tickets sold (tickets cost 10 cents). At the end of the four days, there had been more than 16,000 paid admissions.

Brian Spangle can be reached at brianrspangle60@outlook.com. His latest book, “Hidden History of Vincennes & Knox County,” published in 2020 by The History Press, is available for purchase at the Knox County Public Library and on Amazon.