Word: chickens
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...first-tuners like the Japanese, it is a stunning panorama. There are 3.6 billion chickens in the U.S. but only 170 of them have made it to the 8th Annual International Chicken Flying Contest. It is held, as usual, in the rolling hill country of eastern Ohio, on the 1,100-acre Bob Evans farm at Rio Grande, a crossroads community on two-lane Route 35 between Chillicothe and Charleston...
...Chicken flying is of a piece with turtle derbies, crab races, frog jumps, armadillo rallies and possibly even buffalo chip tosses. There is no entry fee. Owners may enter as many birds as they please. Contestants are divided among four categories according to weight, and prizes of $25, $10 and $5 are awarded for the longest flights in each class, along with bright blue, red and yellow ribbons. Any chicken flying farther than the "world's record" -297 ft. 2 in., set in 1977 by a Japanese blacktail bantam named Kung Flewk -receives a cash prize of $500. What...
...flight director" is Dr. Glyde Marsh, an expert on poultry diseases at Ohio State University. Besides stuffing each bird gently into the mailbox, he makes sure that no contestant has been drugged. None ever has been. "Actually," says Dr. Marsh, "I doubt if you could drug a chicken. Their metabolic rate is too high." If anyone benefits from this chicken flying, it is Farm Owner Bob Evans, 60. In 30 years he parlayed a one-wagon, homemade sausage business into a $105 million sausage and restaurant empire in seven states. One restaurant is close by, and visitors eat there...
...raised with chickens," Evans says. In Gallipolis, a town 13 miles away on the stately Ohio, young Evans haunted the piers where poultry was loaded aboard packet boats for Pittsburgh. If a chicken escaped, kids were allowed to track and keep it. "You could get a small white leghorn, feed it on grain for two weeks and then sell it for a dollar. That was big money when people were making ten cents an hour." For play, kids tossed their chickens out of barn lofts to see how far they could fly. From that recollection came the great flying chicken...
While a recorded chicken loudly clucks to the strains of Glenn Miller's In the Mood on the public address system, the crowd watches the weigh-in conducted by Jake Blazer, 43. Each chicken is expertly thrust headfirst into a metal funnel under a scale hanging from a tripod. Only once is Blazer pecked, by an irritable banty named Mindy (Mork, next up, is more docile). A leghorn named White Flyer escapes in the transfer from box to scale and flies into heavy brush a hundred feet away. The fishnet squad is dispatched. Frets Owner Andy Cline of McArthur...