Fair Offers A Slice Of Fun -- Puyallup Slicer Makes Fair Nicer

------------- PUYALLUP FAIR -------------

8 a.m. to 10 p.m. Admission: $7 adults, $4 youths (ages 6-18), $4 seniors, free for children 5 or younger. Tickets for Northwest Concert shows and the Dodge Truck Series PRCA Rodeo sold separately. Information, 206-841-5045.

The 1995 Western Washington Fair, more commonly known as the Puyallup Fair, is expected to draw 1.5 million people during its 17-day run tomorrow through Sept. 24. It is the seventh-largest fair in North America.

PUYALLUP - It's been shut up for a year, this gray wooden stand with the makeshift chicken-wire interior. It smells like onions, even though a box of Washington's finest jumbo-sized yellows has yet to be opened.

Take a whiff: pleasant, sweet, not too overpowering.

It makes you think of fried onions, heapfuls slathered atop a thick, juicy burger - the perfect Puyallup Fair nourishment after a day of roller-coastering, butter churning and pig racing.

If, while munching on one of the fair's famous onion burgers, you begin to reek just a tad, think of onion peeler Neil Dorfner. Or, rather, think of his wife Anna, who for 17 days must endure a husband who smells like an onion.

"It's in his clothes, his skin, even after he bathes. The smell gets in the bed. It lasts one week after the fair," says Anna Dorfner, 64.

Earlier this week as fairground bleachers were scrubbed and tractors did some last-minute primping, Neil Dorfner settled into his corner in The Onion Room. He cleaned the walls, mopped the floors and washed and stacked the white-plastic, gallon-sized buckets.

This is the third year the 66-year-old retired pipe fitter will work as an onion peeler - paring, coring and slicing onions for burgers and an occasional Philly cheese steak.

"It's kind of fun. Something different," Dorfner says, and he chuckles, his eyes tearing a bit. "She's used to smells," he says, looking at his wife. "I stink like a billy goat most of the time."

It started in 1993 with a visit to the fair's employment offices. Dorfner arrived late and the pickings were slim: Onion Peeler, $5.50 an hour. He wasn't much of a cook, but he was used to working with his hands, so he took the job, to his wife's bewilderment.

"I thought he was crazy. Here he is, a good pipe fitter, and I thought, `Couldn't they find him a good mechanic-type of job?' " she says.

In The Onion Room, Dorfner and four others prep onions for seven food vendors.

A two-person team can peel a 50-pound sack of onions in 35 minutes. Dorfner works six hours but can work up to nine, even 10 hours a day, depending on how hungry the crowd is. On average, the peelers slice onions to fill eight buckets a day.

The work is only slightly intolerable for the first 10 minutes of every shift, Dorfner says, although visitors to The Onion Room have been known to run out faster than the tears streaming down their faces.

The Onion Room is on Midway Boulevard, smack between a pair of public telephones and a string of skinny pens that house chickens, ducks, peacocks, turkeys and other assorted fowl. You'll find Dorfner, as his wife puts it, in the last cage.

Tell him you liked his onions.