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Saturday, August 20, 2005
Not law but pretty cool - "Storm kills power, but not fair's butter cow"
"Storm kills power, but not fair's butter cow" is the headline to this Chicago Tribune story by Christi Parsons, about the Illinois State Fair. Some quotes:
SPRINGFIELD -- When a rainstorm knocked out the power at the Illinois State Fair this week, the first concern was the butter cow.She's made of 600 pounds of butter, and she wouldn't last long in the August heat. She has been a fixture at the fair since 1922.
So after putting all of the other display products on ice, Marla Behrends, a manager at the Midwest Dairy Association, spread a blanket on the ground and slept in the fairgrounds' Dairy Building to make sure no one opened the butter cow's refrigerated display case and let out any of the cold air.
Meanwhile, fair officials held emergency meetings to minimize the damage not just to the butter cow--the unofficial fair mascot--but also to the other significant features of the gargantuan annual event.
The cozy dogs, the pork-on-a-stick, the lemon shake-ups--all were in peril before the 12-hour power outage ended right about lunchtime Friday. The kids sleeping in the barns with their animals were hot without their fans; even hotter were those frantically milking their cows by hand because the machines were out. The gates were locked until midday, so the morning tractor pull was canceled.
As it turned out, Ameren Corp. got the electricity back on before the butter cow went soft. But there were some tense moments before the lights flickered back on and the hot oil vats returned to full-boil. * * *
Workers were sweating from the heat, but Behrends--who kept an eye on the butter cow's temperature gauge--says the thermometer needle stayed at 40 degrees throughout the night.
"The butter cow is a tradition," she said. "A meltdown would have been pretty bad."
Posted by Marcia Oddi on August 20, 2005 10:04 AM
Posted to General News