The Paul Bunyan Lumberjack Show, a traveling act that performs at dozens of state and county fairs and other events across the world, made its Iowa State Fair debut this year.
Three times a day on the Lawn, Lee LeCaptain and his crew of touring lumberjacks are performing feats of logrolling, axe-throwing and other tricks involving wood and sharp objects.
On the fair’s second day, Friday, Aug. 14, the lumberjacks’ last show of the day survived steady rainfall that shortened their act to less than 15 minutes ― about half its usual run time ― but didn’t chase off fairgoers who stuck around to watch.
The show, west of the Jacobson Exhibition Center, is held daily at noon, 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. throughout the fair’s run.
What is the Paul Bunyan Lumberjack Show?
Three performers ― LeCaptain, 66; Connor Birdsong, 27; and Kian Glor, 19 ― make up the cast at the fair, one of dozens of stops the show’s various crews will make across the globe this year. In a typical show, the trio demonstrates the skills of old logging camps: ax throwing, speed wood carving, cross-cut sawing, and the show’s signature event, logrolling, in which two competitors try to knock each other off a spinning log into a water tank.
LeCaptain, a decorated lumber sports competitor, started the show in Florida about 36 years ago.
Friday’s rain-soaked version skipped some of the riskier acts. One was a standing log chop, in which a lumberjack chops between his own feet. It was scrapped because the footing was too slick to be safe. Glor was especially glum about that, given he’d just sharpened his axe to shiny perfection.
“He just wanted to chop,” LeCaptain said.
Rain threatened to cancel lumberjack show
LeCaptain said his troupe usually calls off a show if conditions turn dangerous or if nobody shows up to watch. Neither was true Friday: A crowd donning rain jackets and holding umbrellas dotted the bleachers despite the weather, and the events the crew performed were hardly affected by the weather.
“You inspired us to come out here for you,” LeCaptain told the crowd once the show wrapped. “We greatly appreciate you.”
The shortened show still delivered its centerpiece: a best-of-three logrolling duel between Birdsong and Glor (Birdsong proved victorious), with both men repeatedly dunked into a four-foot-deep tank as LeCaptain played color commentator. LeCaptain also carved a wooden chair with a chainsaw in 42 seconds and gave it away to a family in the front row.
“Usually in an event like this, there’s hardly anybody in the stands,” LeCaptain said. “But here, everybody was in the stands, so we went ahead. You know, if they’re gonna get wet, we might as well, too.”
Global act makes Iowa State Fair debut
The State Fair show provided an introduction to Iowa for Birdsong and Glor.
LeCaptain called the Iowa State Fair a “blue chipper,” one of the summer circuit’s premier stops. Between performances, Birdsong and Glor said they’d sampled a pork tenderloin sandwich, cheese curds, poutine and a chicken-bacon-ranch egg roll. “All pretty good,” Glor said.
Both said, on their drive through the state, they saw more corn than they had ever seen in their lives.
The crew, which LeCaptain said booked 79 dates this year, recently travelled to Australia and Bermuda; recently, sister crews were performing at the Illinois State Fair and the Tennessee State Fair.
The paths that lead to lumberjacking
LeCaptain grew up in Escanaba, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where logrolling was a youth sport; he remembers as many as 100 kids competing in a single summer month.
“Kids learned to do logrolling like they learned to do Little League,” he said.
LeCaptain went on to win national and world titles in log sports on his way to the traveling circuit.
Birdsong, of La Crosse, Wisconsin, also started competing only in logrolling (at age 5) before picking up the show’s other events. He competes professionally, finishing fifth this summer at the logrolling world championships in Hayward, Wisconsin. The prize money ― a little over $2,000 this year ― is “good extra spending money,” he said. He works in marketing for a living.
“I’m kind of just doing this as a side quest,” he said.
Glor, of Middlesex, New York, found lumberjacking sports in college. His team at Finger Lakes Community College, one of roughly 80 schools nationwide with competitive woodsmen programs, won the Northeast Collegiate Woodsmen Conclave in the spring. He’s studying fish and wildlife technology and plans to enter professional competitions once he heads back to school at summer’s end.
Keeping the lumberjack tradition alive
Birdsong said one of his favorite aspects of lumberjack sports is the tradition.
“It’s cool to show the history of the sport,” he said. “It’s all based on real activities people would do as a part of their job. So it’s cool to keep it going a little in some way or another.”
Logrolling, for instance, has its origins in the days when lumberjacks would transport their freshly cut logs downriver, and jump into the water to roll them apart from each other when they would jumble together — in a logjam.
In this way, the performers see themselves as modern-day visages of the lumberjacks who inspired the legend of Paul Bunyan, sizing each other up in competition to determine who’s best.
Glor, Birdsong and LeCaptain will perform for the rest of the fair’s run before moving on to their next stop in North Dakota.
Israel Schuman covers retailing and jobs for the Des Moines Register. Reach him at ieschuman@registermedia.com.
This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Lumberjack show features log-rolling, ax-throwing at Iowa State Fair
Reporting by Israel Schuman, Des Moines Register / Des Moines Register
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By Israel Schuman, Des Moines Register | USA TODAY Network
