Bertha Wipf, 104, gets a bite of funnel cake from Jenni Pope, Monday at the Kansas State Fair in Hutchinson. Wipf goes to the fair every year.

Hutchinson ? Her hearing has faded, and her eyesight has dimmed.

But Bertha Wipf, 104, a resident of Wesley Towers Retirement Center, wasn’t about to let those two small details keep her from making her annual trip to the Kansas State Fair.

“I’ll just see the fair through the eyes of Jenni,” Wipf said, naming Jenni Pope, the staff member who accompanied her to the fair last year. “She wheels me around and tells me what things are.”

With this year’s trip scheduled for Monday, Wipf was up early. Dressed in a white silk blouse with a black skirt and wearing her best red sweater, she waited in her room until Pope and attendant Mandy Harris arrived to load her and her wheelchair into the bus.

Wipf started inquiring about the fair trip two months ago, activity director Char Swofford said. “She told us to make sure she was on the list.”

Swofford pairs residents with a staff member and sends them off to see what they like best: quilts, animals, buildings, food or entertainment.

“It’s up to them,” she said.

With a lap robe wrapped snugly around her legs and clutching a zip-lock plastic bag that held tissues for her nose and $10 in spending money, Wipf, with Pope pushing her wheelchair and Harris alongside, headed for the Sunflower and Meadowlark buildings.

“She likes to gather stuff,” Pope said.

Wipf added more. “If they say ‘It’s free,’ I’ll take it.”

As the trio moved through the buildings, Pope and Harris filled a plastic bag with fair samples: pencils and pens, a comb and emery board from Butler Community College, a Washburn University ruler and a Band-Aid sample from the Kansas Department of Health and Environment.

Along with running her fingers along the edge of the new foam mattresses, Wipf sniffed the fragrance of a bar of Aussie Garden soap and savored the piece of chocolate fudge Pope bought for her.

“She likes chocolate,” Pope said.

As more fair memorabilia went into the bag, Pope shared that last year Wipf arranged the contents of her fair freebie bag on her bed after they returned to her room in Ralph Thorne Center.

Wipf’s memories of the fairs of her youth include the fried chicken and fried sweet potato picnic lunches her mother packed. One year, she rode to the fair with a group of girls in a seven-passenger Whippet automobile. Their youthful male driver coasted “all the way down Rayl’s Hill” as they neared town.

Another year, she and her friend Vera Brown rode the merry-go-round.

“That year, there was the highest Ferris wheel I had ever seen,” she said.

She also made a trip to the 1932 World’s Fair in Chicago.

On the ride back to the towers, Pope prompted Wipf to name what she had enjoyed at the fair.

For Wipf, it was “everything,” but the reminder of the piece of fudge made her face light up.