‘Fearless’ 96-year-old Husband Calling Contest winner and Iowa State Fair mainstay dies

The Iowa State Fair’s Husband Calling Contest is marked by caterwauling and squawking and booming threats of Ohhhhh, you better get in hereeeeee, so help meeeeee …

But amidst all that boisterous screaming, 95-year-old Bonnie Eilert’s high-pitched reminder, hooked onto the end of her yowling and yelping for her husband “ROYYYYYYY” like a perfect little period, will always stick with me: “I Love You!”

Bright and punchy. Delivered with a little mischievousness, maybe. Or lovesickness. Definitely a smile.

“I Love You!”

She was the only contestant — out of the 17 participating in 2023 — who thought to add a little bit of tenderness. “You win more friends with honey than vinegar,” said Rob Sand, part-time Iowa State Fair judge and full-time state auditor.

Eilert’s choice of endearment reaped reward. In front of the largest crowd to ever watch the contest, a result of an old Iowa PBS segment going viral on TikTok the winter previous, Eilert won — a highwater mark in a year stained with grief.

“It feels wunderbar,” she told me. “I love it. I have other blue ribbons, too, but, oh, this is precious.”

Eilert — a State Fair mainstay on par with the chainsaw carvers and the 4-H stage volunteers — died March 22, 2025, on her “beloved farm,” according to her obituary. She was 96.

Born, raised and forever rooted to the land of Jasper County, Eilert graduated from Newton High in 1947 and married her sweetheart, Roy Eilert, in a ceremony at her parents’ home in 1949. The key to their loving marriage, she told me without a whiff of irony that day at the fair, was communication.  

With a strong sense of community honed at an early age, she was a “lifelong advocate for agriculture and rural life” and a stalwart member of the Jasper County Chorus and the Farm Bureau, once serving as the group’s chairwoman.

“Her warm spirit, resilience and dedication to family and community left a lasting impression on everyone who knew her,” her family wrote in the obituary.

And, for more than 40 years, Eilert was the keeper of the First Church key at the State Fair, a volunteer position that let her visit about her cherished fair with tourists from far and wide. A replica of (you guessed it) the first Christian church built on Iowa land in 1834, the First Church was “a place dear to her heart,” her obituary says.

Indeed, the whole fair was much loved by Eilert. In her older years, she was known to wear old-timey clothes — lace stoles and pillbox hats — and tool around the grounds on her scooter. Hills be damned!

All day, every day, there was never too much fair for Bonnie, a legacy her family is honoring by asking for memorial contributions to the Iowa State Fair in lieu of flowers.

Find an excerpt of Courtney Crowder’s column on Bonnie Eilert and the Husband Calling Contest below, and read the full story here.

IOWA STATE FAIRGROUNDS — At 95 years old — or as Bonnie Eilert likes to classify: “I’m older than dirt” — she’s been coming to the State Fair nearly as far back as she can remember. Her parents were farmers, and she married a farmer, so, in August, it’s just what you did, you came to Des Moines, she says.

About four decades ago ― when she first started getting unsteady on her feet ― her daughter Sheryl bought a camper so they could stay on the fairgrounds instead of making the hike back and forth to Newton. She’s been spending her nights at the same site ever since, and passes her days tending to the First Church, a historical prairie church in the fair’s Heritage Village area.

Eilert has been entering the Husband Calling Contest since it began about 40 years ago, she says. But it’s hard to keep track, she admits. This contest is just one of many she enters, one of many of her “adventures,” as she calls them.

“I’m fearless,” she says. “My husband was so against it. He says, ‘Don’t you dare. Don’t you dare.’ ‘I’m going to do it,’ I said.”

So she entered and won: “He left me alone after that. He was proud of me.”

Roy died nearly a decade ago, and Sheryl ― Bonnie’s State Fair sidekick and her live-in caretaker ― died very suddenly this year. Being at the fair without her has been “pretty horrific,” she says.

But attending some of the contests that Sheryl loved so much has been a bit of salve.

“Yes, it’s brought me some comfort because people ask about my dear, charming child,” she says, clutching her ribbon and her winnings, a whopping $15. “Everybody’s just made my day.”

Read the full story here.

Courtney Crowder, the Register’s Iowa Columnist, traverses the state’s 99 counties telling Iowans’ stories. Her State Fair food must-get is the Bauder’s Peppermint Bar. Don’t be ashamed to have seconds! Reach her at ccrowder@dmreg.com or 515-284-8360. Follow her on Twitter @courtneycare.