In our most recent post about the Bloomsburg Fair, we talked about one aspect people often forget: the Lost Child Center, and that voice over the loudspeakers warning us of the dangers.
Let me set the stage for those who didn’t live through it… or those too young to remember. There was a time when you’d go to the Bloomsburg Fair and the crowds were thick. The prices were lower (though people still complained they were too high). Your favorite foods were there, same as now. The air was full of carnival noise, laughter, and the smell of frying peppers and onions.
And cutting through all that was a voice, over and over, announcing the name of a lost child and calling for parents to report to the Lost Child Center.
Kids were lost at the Bloomsburg Fair constantly. It was mind-boggling. The announcements seemed to come every minute of the day, all day, all week. And this went on for generations. I remember being very young, warned by my parents about the dangers of getting lost in the crowd. They always told me where to go if it happened. As I grew older, preteen, then teenager, the fear wasn’t the same. I walked around with friends, never totally on my own until adulthood. But the announcements were nonstop.
In fact, by 1993, it was such a constant part of the fair that it even made it into the Press Enterprise newspaper’s comments section. Long before the internet gave us real-time commentary, a Bloomsburg resident called in to complain about the Lost Child Center. He said the office was so congested with kids that he couldn’t even reach an adult to report his own missing child. That was how common it was.
The 1980s especially felt like the epicenter of “lost kid” culture—think milk cartons, think Johnny Gosch. In 1993, Press Enterprise reporter Susan Brook covered just how busy the Lost Child Center was. The article spun it in a positive light: staff said they were having fun “keeping people found.” The average wait was about 25 minutes to reunite a child with their parents. Still, the place was busy, though mostly with kids under ten—teenagers weren’t really their concern.
By the Clinton era, things hadn’t gotten much better. In October 1998, Press Enterprise reported that the fair was testing a new device called the Child Guard. A co-owner described how it worked: both the parent and child wore a necklace, and if the child wandered too far, it beeped. The idea sounds silly now—imagine hundreds of beepers going off across the fairgrounds. It never caught on, but it was one of the first attempts to use technology to prevent kids from getting lost.
Even into the early 2000s, the Lost Child Center stayed busy, though the numbers started to dip. And now? Today, it’s practically silent. No one seems to get lost anymore at the Fair. Phones, apps like Life360, constant calls and texts, and yes, maybe more protective parenting have changed everything. The Lost Child Center is still there, staffed and ready, but the culture around it has shifted. You just don’t hear those announcements anymore.
Stay safe out there. Never become a statistic. Always watch your children, and always have a meeting spot or a plan.
As an adult, I’ll admit—I kind of like “getting lost” at the Bloomsburg Fair. Unfortunately, we always end getting found somehow.
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