You know the butter sculptures, your mouth waters for all manner of fried food on a stick, and who can pass up a look at the endless parade of livestock? But there’s one event that’s taken over the Iowa State Fair: the husband calling contest.
The contest has taken over social media, with clips from past contests racking up more than a million views. These clips show finalists taking turns bellowing, crooning, or theatrically screeching their husbands’ names into a microphone. The prize? Five dollars and a ribbon. The response online? Astonishment.
To outsiders, the contest probably looks like some kind of avant-garde performance art accidentally dropped into a state fair. Contestants stomp their feet, cup their hands, and stretch their voices in directions that seem to ignore all known rules of sound. But in Iowa, it’s just another August tradition, as routine as the hog calling and mom calling competitions that share space in Pioneer Hall under the banner of “heritage contests.”
These competitions have been happening for decades. Sign-up is informal, usually an hour before showtime, and the crowd always shows up. The hall is often standing-room-only, a mix of loyal fairgoers and curious first-timers who can’t quite believe what they’re about to witness. Some people lean into the comedy, some summon real emotion, and some split the difference, but everyone gets a ribbon.
If the sudden wave of TikTok notoriety makes the whole thing seem like a quirky novelty cooked up for clicks, longtime fans know better. In fact, one of the contest’s reigning figures, Bonnie Swalwell Eilert, spent more than four decades perfecting her calls. At 94 years old, she was still winning before passing away earlier this year. She was such a fixture that she even turned up on NBC’s Little Big Shots: Forever Young, where her talents were broadcast to a national audience years before social media “discovered” her.
For many fairgoers, the contest embodies the spirit of the Iowa State Fair itself: part sincere, part absurd, and never short on spectacle. It’s the rare tradition that thrives both in person and online. In Pioneer Hall, the sound rattles the rafters. On social media, it rattles sensibilities. Either way, the husband calling contest is proof that sometimes the most lasting cultural exports come not from Hollywood, but from a barn-like building in Des Moines where a dozen people once again step up to a microphone and yell for their husbands.
