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The Big E Returns With A Familiar Fair And Differences Due To The Pandemic

ESE
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An undated photograph of large crowds on the midway at the Eastern States Exposition.

Last year's cancellation meant economic hardship for many longtime vendors

After it was canceled last year during the pandemic, the largest agricultural-themed fair in the northeast has returned to western Massachusetts.

The Big E began is 17-day run this morning at the Eastern States Exposition fairgrounds in West Springfield.

The local health board has ordered that face masks must be worn in all indoor spaces open to the public regardless of a person’s vaccination status.

There is also a little more open space than usual on the fairgrounds this year because some vendors did not return.

WAMC’s Pioneer Valley Bureau Chief Paul Tuthill spoke with fair president Gene Cassidy.

Paul Tuthill is WAMC’s Pioneer Valley Bureau Chief. He’s been covering news, everything from politics and government corruption to natural disasters and the arts, in western Massachusetts since 2007. Before joining WAMC, Paul was a reporter and anchor at WRKO in Boston. He was news director for more than a decade at WTAG in Worcester. Paul has won more than two dozen Associated Press Broadcast Awards. He won an Edward R. Murrow award for reporting on veterans’ healthcare for WAMC in 2011. Born and raised in western New York, Paul did his first radio reporting while he was a student at the University of Rochester.