From bubble hockey to dahlias: a Syracuse competitive streak finds a new outlet
For many Syracuse families, the New York State Fair is a summer ritual of food, games and exhibits. For one local attorney, it has been a decades-long arena where a childhood competitiveness found a more refined outlet: growing plants and flowers that earn ribbons in the fair’s Horticulture Building.
Mark Ventrone grew up on Bellevue Avenue and remembers summer days at the fair that mixed the carnival’s noisy contests with the quieter displays inside the Horticulture Building. He said the siblings in his household pushed each other constantly.
"We were very close," Ventrone said, "and we competed with each other for everything."
Early contests included games of wiffle ball, bubble hockey and the ubiquitous fair-floor standbys like the ping-pong-ball goldfish and glassware games — prizes that he recalled as often being "no one really needed." At 16, after taking a job at the McDonald’s on Adams Street, he said he spent his first pocket money trying to win a Boston Red Sox desk lamp at one of those games — a memory he now recounts with rueful humor.
From family outings to ribbon-winning entries
Those childhood visits also exposed Ventrone to the horticulture displays that would come to mean more to him than the midway. He recalled that his parents brought him and his sister through every building and that the annual flower exhibits stayed with him.
Years later, already practicing law and a partner at the Burnet Avenue firm Kimpel, Gideon and Ventrone, he began entering plants and flowers in the state fair. What started as a direct challenge in 1990 — after his law firm won a ribbon for roses — grew into a serious avocation and a stream of awards.
- Childhood: grew up on Bellevue Avenue and competed with sister Joyce at the fair
- Teen years: first job at McDonald’s on Adams Street and early fair spending
- 1990: took a direct challenge that led to showing plants at the State Fair
- Later years: entered the Horticulture Building as a practicing attorney and collected ribbons
Local connections and the pull of the Horticulture Building
Ventrone’s story highlights a pattern many Syracuse residents will recognize: the fair as more than fleeting entertainment. For some, it’s a place to display community pride — whether by showcasing local produce, crafts or horticulture — and for others it’s a connective tradition that threads generations together.
Photographs from past state fairs show judges scrutinizing dahlias and other entries inside the Horticulture Building, underscoring how seriously exhibitors take the competitions. For Ventrone, that seriousness turned a youthful competitive instinct toward cultivation and exhibition rather than carnival prizes.
| Aspect | Local detail |
|---|---|
| Neighborhood | Bellevue Avenue, Syracuse |
| Early job | McDonald’s on Adams Street |
| Professional role | Partner, Kimpel, Gideon and Ventrone (Burnet Avenue) |
| Fair involvement | Exhibiting plants and flowers in the Horticulture Building; ribbon winner |
Ventrone’s experience is one of many souvenirs readers have shared about their own fair memories: not only the trinkets that fill a plastic bag, but the traditions that shape how residents spend their summers and how they bring family histories into public life. For Syracuse people who stroll past the Horticulture Building each fair, his story is a reminder that the state fair is as much a competition as a celebration.
The New York State Fair’s horticulture exhibitions continue to draw entries from across the region, and they remain a place where local cultivators — whether lifelong gardeners or new exhibitors with a friendly challenge — can pursue recognition for their work.
For Ventrone, the fair provided a way to channel a lifelong urge to compete into something that contributes to community culture and the quiet pride of a ribbon earned under close scrutiny.
