County Fair Planning Committee Declares Funnel Cake vs. Cream Puff Debate "Tabled Until Conditions Improve" As Fair Opens At 96 Degrees

WAUKESHA — The longest-running dispute in Waukesha County Fair governance has been suspended, at least temporarily, by the weather.

Meeting in emergency session Wednesday morning in the dairy barn, which members confirmed was selected because it is the coolest building on the fairgrounds, the Waukesha County Fair planning committee voted 8-1 to formally table the funnel cake versus cream puff question "until conditions improve." The vote came less than 24 hours after the fair opened Tuesday in 96-degree heat, with a heat index that reached 104 by mid-afternoon.

Committee chair Diane Vandehey, 61, who has presided over the dispute for six of its eleven years, described the decision as a posture of "thermal neutrality."

"Both factions came to the same realization at the same time, which has never happened before," Vandehey said. "Nobody wants a fried pastry when it's 96 degrees. Nobody wants a whipped cream product when it's 96 degrees. For the first time in eleven years, we agree on something. It happens to be that both of our positions are currently unappetizing."

The numbers support her. According to concession data reviewed by this newspaper, fairgoers on opening day purchased 212 funnel cakes and 187 cream puffs. Over the same period, a single stand near the midway sold 1,640 nine-dollar cups of ice, a product it describes on its menu board only as "ICE."

"For the first time in eleven years, we agree on something. It happens to be that both of our positions are currently unappetizing."

— Diane Vandehey, committee chair

A Schism, Briefly Cooled

The question has divided the committee since 2015, when a proposal to name an official "signature food" of the fair deadlocked 5-5 and was never successfully revisited. Longtime readers will recall the committee's June meeting, at which the debate over which pastry better represents "Wisconsin values" entered its third hour before Vandehey tabled the discussion and ordered both.

Wednesday's session, by contrast, lasted 17 minutes, making it the shortest meeting in committee history. Members described the atmosphere as "cordial," "subdued," and "extremely humid."

The cream puff faction's longtime floor leader, who asked to be identified only as a dairy producer from the Town of Genesee, conceded that his product "has a known relationship with heat" and that Tuesday's conditions had been "frankly hostile to whipped filling." A cooler at one cream puff stand was measured at 61 degrees Tuesday afternoon, which the vendor described as "doing its best."

The funnel cake side fared no better. "You're asking someone to stand over a fryer in a heat advisory and then hand the result to a person who is also in the heat advisory," said one funnel cake vendor, who declined to give her name because she was "too hot." "Nobody wins."

The Minority Report

The lone dissenting vote came, as it often does, from Bob Krueger, the retired DPW supervisor and occasional opinion contributor to this newspaper, who attended as a citizen advisor and was granted a courtesy vote he was not, strictly speaking, entitled to.

Krueger has filed a nine-page minority report arguing that cream puffs "hold up fine in heat if you eat them fast enough," citing as precedent the summer of 1988, when he says he personally consumed a cream puff in 98-degree weather at the state fair "in under forty seconds, no structural failure."

"A cream puff holds up fine in heat if you eat it fast enough. I proved this in 1988 and I can prove it again."

— Bob Krueger, retired DPW supervisor, minority report, p. 4

The report includes a hand-drawn diagram of what Krueger calls the "consumption window," a table of dew points from August 1988, and a standing offer to demonstrate the technique "at any time, at committee expense."

"The report has been received," Vandehey said, when asked whether it had been received.

City Hall Declines To Take A Side

Reached at his office, Councilman Gary Puchalski, who does not sit on the fair committee but has historically been unable to avoid being asked about it, declined to endorse either pastry.

"I have constituents on both sides of the pastry aisle," Puchalski said. "What I will say is that it was 96 degrees on Tuesday, and my office received eleven calls about the heat, four about the train, and one asking whether the ice stand takes Discover. Those are the issues I'm focused on."

The train call, Puchalski confirmed, concerned a freight train that stopped on the Broadway crossing for 24 minutes Tuesday afternoon, during which at least one fairbound minivan idled in direct sun with its air conditioning, per the driver's later Nextdoor post, "fighting for its life." The driver reported being unaware of the Newhall Avenue underpass. Most people are.

Conditions Expected To Improve

Forecasts call for highs in the low 80s by the weekend, and committee members acknowledged that the truce is unlikely to survive the cooldown. Asked what "conditions improving" would formally mean, Vandehey consulted the motion's language and confirmed it does not say.

"We didn't define it," she said. "On purpose."

As the meeting adjourned, members filed out of the dairy barn and back into the heat. At the ice stand, the line was 41 people long. A funnel cake stand across the midway stood empty, its fryer on, out of principle.

The Waukesha County Fair runs through Sunday. The committee's next regular session is scheduled for August, weather permitting, at which point hostilities are expected to resume.