The 2016 Iowa State Fair ends Sunday, but without Don Greiman it probably would have never made it to its 162nd year.

Greiman first made his way to the Iowa State Fair at age five. He's been coming back ever since. He'll celebrate his 90th birthday next month and says, "I'm like a kid yet."

Don Greiman has been on the state fair board for more than four decades and receives tons of credit for helping keep it alive during the farm crisis and reinvigorating it afterward. He tells KCCI, "per capita, we do better than any other state fair in the nation."

The first Iowa State Fair was held less than eight years after Iowa officially became a state. The entire budget that year, in 1854, was $323. My how it's grown, because of people like Don Greiman.

The fair is one of our state's crown jewels, setting a bar so high few others even dream of being able to equal it. It puts smiles on hundreds of thousands of faces every August, but perhaps none as big as the one on Don Greiman's face.

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