When the Iowa State Fair food department moved into the state-of-the-art Elwell Family Food Center, the architects asked longtime supervisor Arlette Hollister where she would like her new office.

Considering that, every August, Arlette oversaw more than 200 cooking contests that would draw at least 10,000 entries and offer a purse of about $75,000, a bit of private space for this muffin maven to keep papers and breathe air free from powdered sugar seemed like an essential part of the upgrade.

But Arlette’s response was steadfast: No office.

A small desk just off the showroom floor and a landline phone would be all she needed, thank you very much. From there she could be a kind of wizard-not-behind-the-curtain, making sure that the hundreds of moving parts needed to put on this 11-day spectacle were not only well-oiled but invisible to fairgoers.

As family and friends feted Arlette, who died of natural causes Thursday at age 88, during a joyous celebration of life Tuesday, this story cropped up again and again. Eschewing an office was just so emblematic of everyone’s “fair lady” — never flashy, self-effacing to a fault and laser-focused on ensuring every visitor had carefree fun at America’s largest state fair food contest.

“She was genuinely kind and so gracious,” said Eileen Gannon, a longtime food competitor from Des Moines. “She loved the State Fair food contests so much that she would go out of her way to teach people and help them through the process of entering. She spread that joy to everyone she met.”

With a frail frame, soft voice and tiny glasses sat squarely on the end of her nose, her professorial exterior betrayed the blue-ribbon visionary she truly was. Before food competitions were popular and before Food Network, Bravo and HGTV made cooking a competitive sport, there was Arlette.

In her 30-year tenure, Arlette raised the food department's profile, working year-round to secure new sponsors, streamline entry forms, engage younger bakers and train staff. Almost single-handedly, Arlette grew her department from just another fair contest to the pinnacle of culinary competitions nationwide.

Arlette and the State Fair are so interconnected it's hard to imagine one without the other, friends said. And as the annual parade of pastry makers flow into the fair this summer, there will no doubt be a pie-slice-shaped hole where Arlette once was.

“All of us who work in the food department, we call ourselves a ‘fair family,’ and we’ve lost our matriarch,” said Karen McKilligan, who took over as fair food superintendent when Hollister stepped down a few years ago. “It’s a huge blow, but we are going to carry forward what she taught us and how she did things.

"In some way, she will always be a part of us.”

‘Thanks for being you’

If you spent any time around Arlette’s little wooden desk you knew she had a wicked sense of humor branded with her trademark sass. When she wasn’t being interrupted by a food emergency or a longtime admirer, her favorite quip was the only “D” she ever got in college was in Home Ec.

Born in Harlan, Iowa, on Tax Day in 1930, Arlette was a “spitfire” from birth, said the Rev. Scott Paczkowski, pastor of Westminster Presbyterian.

As a child, Arlette wore her hair in pigtails and would get “hopping mad” when little boys tried to dip her 'tails into inkwells.

Raised in Oklahoma, Arlette went to St. Olaf College in Minnesota, studying English and speech before landing a teaching job in Audubon, Iowa. Though only there for a few years, the young teacher made a fast impression: In the lobby during Tuesday’s service sat a bouquet of purple flowers from the Audubon Class of 1957, addressed to their “beloved high school teacher and friend.”

She met her husband, Glen, in the small rural town and the pair began a 63-year-long love story.

As the family shuffled through Arlette’s belongings this week, they found handfuls of cards Glen wrote to his wife, granddaughter Laura Hollister said. Every single one was signed with, “Thanks for being you.”

The couple moved to Des Moines in the early '60s when Glen got a job at the Iowa Farm Bureau. Arlette took a position teaching at Franklin Junior High but left to raise her two children, Mark and Debra.

For decades, Arlette would sit in the back of Westminster’s sanctuary, waiting for Glen, an usher, to sneak in next to her for worship services.

“They exuded love,” Paczkowski said. “And it wasn’t just her supporting him, which was common in those times, he was very supportive and very proud of her. They were equals in their relationship.”

And they were inseparable, too, until Glen’s death seven months ago. They were together again Tuesday when Arlette was buried next to him in the Veteran's Cemetery.

‘Ask Arlette’

With rows and rows of brightly lit refrigerators displaying blue-ribbon jam after blue-ribbon pie after blue-ribbon party dip, the State Fair food contest oozes pomp and circumstance.

Which is ironic considering the "Arlette era" began as unceremoniously as possible.

In 1984, her husband, a one-time Polk County Fair president, got to talking to the state fair’s director of competitive events, who spilled that they were in need of a new food supervisor.

“Ask Arlette,” Glen said.

Arlette discovered she had been volunteered later that day when a customer at a local fabric store where she worked offered congratulations on her new role.

“I didn’t have a clue as to what to do,” Arlette told the Register in 2015.

She learned quick, growing the two dozen contests the fair had then into more than 200, which now run simultaneously from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. on four different stages. The food department is so celebrated that other fairs have sent employees out to shadow Arlette, McKilligan said.

Over the years, Arlette landed celebrity judges like Martha Stewart and late White House press secretary Tony Snow. She knew how to hop on a “viral” moment before there was such a thing.

She invited former Iowa columnist Chuck Offenburger to host a competition for cinnamon rolls, capitalizing on his ultra-popular annual best Iowa cinnamon roll column in the Register. After a few years, she secured Tone’s Spices as a sponsor and grew the purse to several thousand dollars.

“That was all Arlette,” Offenburger said. “She made that contest what it was, and she made the food department a favorite stopping point on par with the Butter Cow and the free egg-on-a-stick.”

Glitz and fondant aside, the food contests were always about the bakers to Arlette, McKilligan said. Arlette understood that the people who carry in their entries as gingerly as newborns saw their rhubarb crumble not as a blue ribbon, but a little piece of their family history.

“The first thing I noticed about Arlette was her engaging smile,” McKilligan said. “She was diligent and committed as far as how the days went, but she went about it in a way that made people feel special.”

In 2016, Arlette — who was an independent leader — decided she needed to train an assistant to help her transition into retirement. McKilligan spent that year shadowing Arlette with plans to act as her second-in-command during the next fair.

But just before the 2017 fair, Arlette had a fall and McKilligan stepped in, uncovering plenty of things that only Arlette knew, yet somehow managing to keep everything afloat.

McKilligan remained very close friends with Arlette, who visited the fair in both 2017 and 2018.

“I’m trying to prepare myself for how different this year is going to be,” McKilligan said. “The last couple years when people asked about her we could say how she was doing and that she might be dropping by.

“This year will be the first year in more than three decades that she won’t be coming by at all.”

More than the fair

When I first arrived at Westminster for Arlette’s funeral, I was shocked that the place wasn’t decked out in corn dogs and funnel cakes. But as I settled in and listened to her friends and family reminisce I realized I would be remiss to categorize Arlette solely as the “fair lady.”

For more than 40 years, Arlette was a reading buddy and a recess monitor at Hillis Elementary, stopping only when she fell two years ago. She volunteered countless hours in the office at Westminster and constantly sought ways to strengthen her faith.

She was a world-class seamstress. She left out food for squirrels and raccoons and even put unused fleece on the deck for birds to use in their nests.

She loved wine — despite accepting an award from the Women’s Christian Temperance Union — and her favorite food was potato chips, a bag of which her family made sure found its way into the casket.

It's true that every August she became “Home Ec teacher to the entire state of Iowa,” as Offenburger termed her.

But what she really was to generations of fair “workers,” bakers and visitors was a friend with a steady smile and maybe a bit of trademark sass waiting to greet you on the west side of the fair.

Arlette “dined at the table of life,” said her friend, the Rev. Marion Eppright.

Thanks, Arlette, for letting us all pull up a chair once in a while.

COURTNEY CROWDER, the Register's Iowa Columnist, traverses the state's 99 counties telling Iowans' stories. She's trying to learn how to cook and hopes to enter a State Fair food contest one day. You can contact her at (515) 284-8360 or ccrowder@dmreg.com. Follow her on Twitter @courtneycare.