City Boy at the Fair

This is the week of the Ashland County Fair in Ohio and the Stauffer family is participating as they have for generations. When Sue was growing up she showed horses and sewing projects. Forty-nine years later, Sue’s nephews, three generations removed, are showing their steers at the Fair.

In 1969, I participated in the Ashland County Fair. One of the small fun events between the major ones was a milking contest among teachers in the five high schools in Ashland County. The principal at Hillsdale High School where I was teaching chemistry and physics, Gene Yeager, had been the school’s representative in the contest for years and won it regularly. He grew up on a farm and milked cows by hand. Apparently, his string of wins at the Fair led to an agreement that each high school would send a first-year teacher. The “city boy” from New Jersey” was designated as the Hillsdale representative.

My father was a carpenter, not a farmer, but we lived in a farming area of NJ – Hammonton, dead center in the south. The crops were blueberries (Hammonton is the Blueberry Capital of the World), strawberries, tomatoes (there is nothing like a Jersey tomato), sweet potatoes, peaches..., what are referred to as truck crops; no corn, no soybeans, and no dairy cows. Nonetheless, to folks in north-central Ohio being from NJ meant I was a “city boy.”

To prep for the contest, Sue took me to a neighbor, Mike McDaniel, who still had a cow he milked. I headed into the content with one lesson under my belt. Sue's nephews, Mark and Doug, helped by pointing out a cow in the line-up that was dripping (ready to be milked).

Well, I did not milk faster than the other teachers, however I did run faster to the line of cows – to the cow Sue’s nephews pointed out – and back to the finish line with my bottle of fresh milk and so won the contest. The prize was a ribbon, not nearly as big as the ones they place on animals that win first in class. Fortunately there are no photos of the event (the photo here are of recent Ashland Co. Fairs from the Internet).