Maudine Ormsby, circa 1926: That's Homecoming Queen Maudine, left, in the halter. Center is then Illini Gov. Frank Louden; right is Alfred Vivian, dean of the OSU College of Agriculture. (Photo courtesy OSU Archives, Rai Goerler, Kevlin Haire.) Maudine LXXXII today continues the fine line of offspring residing (during good weather months) in the Maudine Ormsby Memorial Paddocks. LXXXII is visited regularily by OSU Ag Emeritus David Zartman and Cow Town Historian Doral Chenoweth.

Cow Town, Live With It.... Circa 1926: Columbus should play to its historic strengths... Surprise: Columbus has many reasons to be called a Cow Town. Good reasons: Wendy's, White Castle, Mitchell's and Hyde Park steakers...and Maudine Ormsby. Such use of the term Cow Town. usually indicates the user doesn't know what the hell he is talking about. Ignorance presides. Columbus and Ohio are major food providers...field, stream and manufactured foods to help feed the world. We should be praising Ohio's ability to produce. We need a symbol that has been waiting since 1926 to take her place in our hearts and minds -- again, Maudine Ormsby. Maudine was a beautiful Holstein residing in what should be named and preserved as the Maudine Ormsby Memorial Paddocks, southeast corner of Ackerman and Kenny roads. She was introduced as OSU Homecoming Queen, legitimately elected in 1926, when agricultural students decided their campus student population should be praised. They ran Maudine against a gaggle of Greek frat entries. OSU footballers played the Illini that weekend. Just which football team won that year has been lost to sports records and who gives a damn? Maudine continues as a trivia question among the faithfull. Even that is fading. This website, since it is devoted to all-things-food in Columbus, will refresh Maudine in the minds of the populace. Mere Maudine memories should be expanded beyond this website. It has been discussed among interested parties...that a pole barn be erected over the watering trough at Ackerman and Kenny roads. While about it, OSU powers should finally take a study trip to the paddocks. They should consider fencing off a blacktop parking area at the Kenny road entrance....no more than six vehicle spaces...make it exclusive. They should post a bronze (historical) marker noting the 1926 fun, and now...the name for those peaceful acres: the Maudine Ormsby Memorial Paddocks. Create visitor seating, possibly shaded picnic tables for families to use as a grassy teaching site...the meaning of all-things-cattle to children...children who seldom if ever see a live and producing cow. And this website has the teacher for such...Micki Zartman. She's already doing such fun teachings on the ag campus...but in a remote and unpublicized location. The Zartman Cow Course...that should be a credit course ... Consider: How important is beef and related products to Columbus? (*) See name note below. Origin of Cow Town ...or is it to be Cowtown? We will use it as two words. Decades ago a Pulitzer prize reporter, Paul Gapp, returned to Columbus from his then residence in Chicago. He was a Chicago Tribune reporter after starting his newsroom career at the Columbus Dispatch. At the Trib he was the architectural reporter which brought him the Pulitzer. Gapp told it this way: From his focal point at Ackerman and Kenny, he could see tops of buildings on the OSU campus and edges of the Downtown in dead of winter. In spring and summer he became fixed on the grazing cows across the paddock fences at Ackerman and Kenny. When he was doing a story on Columbus, he tagged his typescript (no Internet in his work days) as cowtown. When some copy editor wrote the headline for the ink-on-pulp editions, the handle of Cowtown was the eye catcher. Now you know. (*) Webster does not get into the issue of Cow Town being two words; SpellCheck wants it to be two words by dropping the "check" part. So, opt for our two-word use. --- Doral Chenoweth. Columbus Native Creates Seattle's Popular Postcard Hartz's Flying Fish, a fish concession at Pike Place, Seattle. Seattle's Food Focal Point: All visitors to this wonderful town make a first visit to Pike Place... probably the most appealing place to stroll and savor in the nation. More than half a hundred food choices on any given day. First they rub the nose of the brass pig at the entrance. Second, they pause to watch the flying fish...memorialized here by a Columbus native, David Hartz, on a popular post card. Columbus lost its chance to play up food when the Borden powers ignored the potential of having a brass milk cow named Elsie posted in the northeast corner of Broad and North Third streets. Borden was interested, but departed the milk business before locking down at that address. In lieu of Elsie, a trademark departed, praise Maudine Ormsby.

OSU Arts Grad Creates Image for Maudine Ormsby The image of Ohio State's homecoming queen, circa 1926, needs refreshing. David Hartz, a 1980 graduate with a masters of fine arts, has filled the bill. At the request of this website he has created the image for Maudine Ormsby, the beautiful Holstein nominated by ag students to compete against the Greek entry. In those days ag students outnumbered frat and sorority types. It was an honest election. The student body knew that Maudine had different packaging than homecoming queen entries in previous years. Image creator Hartz is now an associate professor, Electronics Media Communications, Raymond Walters College, University of Cincinnati. David Hartz Hartz has an international reputation for playing with fire. He's known as Cincinnati's pyrotechnic Renaissance man. He's set fires around the world...all licensed and controlled in fire sculpture competitons, the most recent in Estonia in January. Hartz became fascinated with fire as a Boy Scout when he learned the hard way...rubbing two sticks together to make fire. Today he's hot around the world. Google has his story...beyond Maudine. www.scn.org/fremont/fac/hartz.htm

Dr. Zartman at the Kenny road entrance to Maudine's paddocks.

Cow Town doc, while retired, still makes tender, loving visits... The Maudines of today get loving attention on a regular basis. OSU ag professor emeritus David Zartman is a frequent paddock visitor. He's one of the 30,000-plus Kenny road drivers passing by daily. The paddocks are his primary destination during grazing months. Dr. Zartman is friendly with his Holsteins. While all are tagged with a number, the retired ag professor probably has a name for each. COW TOWN DOC: Dr. David Zartman, an authority on Ohio agriculture, lectures on what Ohio has to offer when he travels around the world to study foreign food chain issues.

The Maudine Ormsby Memorial Paddocks: There's a whole lot of milk being produced within our city llimits. According to Ohio Department of Agriculture there are some 2,400 cows in Franklin County. This image at Ackerman and Kenny roads, OSU campus. Ohio State's roots go back to 1870, when the Ohio General Assembly established the Ohio Agricultural and Mechanical College

Be Advised: Maudine's paddocks at Kenny and Ackerman could become both a memory and a dog racing track... Be advised: commercial developers are picking apart the grass lands and farm fields on the west side campus at The Ohio State University. Targeted: All that green grass, acres of calming feeder corn, grazing Holsteins in season, floral plots. And say goodbye to the playing fields for for intramural sports operating for healthy students favoring skill games minus ticket boxes. Those twin silos of grain fodder breaking our flat skyline will disappear. Peaceful,, isn't it? In recent months Fisher Commons has replaced a feeder corn field at Kenny and Woody Hayes. Plans are being blue printed for student housing along Kinnear road. There are modern robber barons who view Don Scott Field being converted to condo use. Over the years real estate types think the rolling hillocks of OSU golf links should be used for estate homes...ya know, homes that could be protected as gated communities. Folks, be advised...and warned...take positions: No BP stations. Not one acre, not one hectare, not one cube of soil, not one square foot of sod, not a peck of dirt, not one pail of fishing worms, not one corn stalk, not one heifer should be disturbed. Or uprooted as the case may be. Governor-appointees running state universities such as OSU should preside in open meetings and implant in their 2009 minutes firm positions to protect the status quo. Preserve for posterity. Protect peaceful acres. Protect Maudines of the future. Protect forever Waterman farms. No Iowa egg manufacturing. No strip centers. No life style malls. No convenience stores. No burial grounds. No NASCAR test tracks. No tent preachers. No rendering plants. No used car dealers. No concrete plants. No penal institutions. No green for the greedy. Test yourself: How many times do you drive along North Star or Kenny roads and have pleasant thoughts about the nation's most important university? If in doubt about the good things all this OSU green means to Columbus, Google neighborhood maps for CUNY, Columbia University, University of Chicago, even the Sorbonne. Columbus State Community College? Think land locked and blacktop. Preserve Maudine Ormsby's acres. Ask about the Gee Tours: 614-538-1822.

COSI once worked hard to 'shed' a valuable image... Here's a classic ill-advised press release put out by COSI some years ago. The COSI flack used the two-word version, Cow Town, as a news hook to puff Ohio agriculture. Here's the pitch in toto... We're Still A Little Bit Country Though Columbus has worked hard to shed its image as a cow town, the truth remains that agriculture is a big part of the Buckeye state. For the third year in a row, COSI is bringing the farm to downtown, with more than a dozen pieces of huge farming equipment arranged on COSI's English Plaza and Washington Blvd. Discover how technology is used on today's farms and how farming has changed through the years. You can climb into the cabs of tractors, a combine, lawn and garden equipment and more. Kids can test their driving skills on a pedal tractor obstacle course and make a seed necklace to take home. You can even collect a set of free Farm Days trading cards, each representing equipment, crops and more that an Ohio farmer would use. Come explore your inner cow town. Farm Days Location: COSI Columbus, 333 W. Broad Street cosi.org

...editor's note... "your inner cow town..." ??????????????? Huh?

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