I attended several times in the 70s and early 80s.

I remember driving north through Wisconsin to get there late one night watching a tremendous lightning show ahead of me.

Flying there in an antique airplane is a rediscovery of the best of the country. I was coming in to a controlled regional airport on the way there in the rain in a Great Lakes (open cockpit biplane) when the wind changed while I was on base. The controller notified me of the wind change and let me do a 270º turn in the pattern to line up with the runway with the least crosswind. When I went up to the tower to thank him for that unusual courtesy he said "we get lots of you guys this time of year and we try to accomodate you".

I was forced down by a storm front at Waukeegan and the heavens opened as I landed. Out of the pouring rain comes a guy who directs me to his friend's vacant tie down and offers me a hot meal and a bed for the night.

A young couple I met at Oshkosh had been forced by fog to land their newly restored 1946 Taylorcraft in a soybean field. The farmer and his wife hauled their airplane to their barn and put them up for three days until the weather broke and the field was dry enough to take off from. They never said a word about the damaged soybeans.

There are vast areas of this country that are still small towns 10 miles apart surrounded by family farms and when you travel into that country the people act like we would like to believe they acted back in the 40s and 50s.