On yet another rainy day at the State Fair of Texas, you will find one voice all this October rain can't drown out.
"Get your maps," Rose Landin can be heard yelling from the Hospitality Center near the DART gate.
"Turn to your right and you see Big Tex and it's in front of him," she told another fair goer in search of a corny dog.
And then, like two girls from Forney did, marvel at Rose Landin's age. "I'm a hundred," she told the teenagers.
"Really," they gasped. "You look good for your age," one of them said.
Rose laughed and said, "Yes, I'm a hundred years old.”
Rose has been a fixture at the fair for more than 25 years. She and her late husband volunteered several more years before that. "So I had worked before, but I hadn't worked for pay. And now I’m working for pay," she laughed.
And despite her age, and despite all this rain, she's worked five days a week, four hours a day traveling to and from Fair Park on public transportation. And the information booth she works in alongside two co-workers is just yards away from the Gulf Cloud fountain she remembers first seeing as a child. The fountain was installed in 1916 two years before she was born. When she first saw the fountain, she was an orphan on a school field trip with other young girls from her orphanage.
"Every time I talk about it, I get broken up." she said of the memory. "But, we had a lot of fun."
The fun she has now keeps her coming back year after year. Even though, no, she doesn't like the rain either. "Good days and bad days," she said of her days at the fair. "The bad days is when it rains," she laughed. "It's good, but I would rather not have it."
And to her co-workers, there is a lesson in the life of Rose Landin. If Rose can brave all this water at 100 - what's your excuse? "If she can get up every day, the rest of us need to get up every day," said Flora Alexander who works with Rose in the information booth. "She's just an inspiration you know. Anybody that crawls out of bed at a hundred years old, she has to be an inspiration to us all."
"Let's put it this way," Rose said. "I go one day at a time. If I get up tomorrow, OK. I come. If not, that'll be it," she laughed.
"It's good to see you again," another fair goer told her.
"Well it's good to see you," she answered.
"I hope to see you next year," he said.
"I hope so. I hope everything goes alright," Rose said.
So as the storm clouds move through Fair Park, and you consider just staying home safe and dry, remember Rose Landin. Because rain or shine she plans to be here for year one hundred and one.