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By Pauline Masson
How do cities choose the themes for festivals aimed at bringing residents out of their homes, attracting visitors and improving the local economy?
In my tenure here since 1988, Pacific has held Pride Day Festivals, Railroad Day Festivals, and Halloween Festivals, all of which draw good crowds. The public shows up here for parades, sports tournaments and rodeos.
Former alderman Rick Layton once organized a Safety Awareness Day – on the grocery store parking log of all place – that grew into a festival attracting not only Pacific residents and out of town shoppers but educators, civic organizations, health providers, and first responders and from across the region. Even an air ambulance helicopter showed up.
I thought that Mr. Layton had triggered the big crowd tendency that we enjoy, but I recently came across a Pacific Festival that showed that he just tapped into a phenomenon that had a long history here.
In 1930, the Pacific Chamber of Commerce, then barely two years in existence, staged Pacific Cow Day. Yep, Cow Day.
Pacific was already something of a commercial dairy center. Beauchamp’s Dairy, Averydale Dairy, Byrns Farm and Brookdale Farm were milking dairy herds and supplying bottled milk and fresh packed butter to residents, stores and schools. By 1940, Hogan Dairy was advertising pasteurized milk, buttermilk, chocolate milk, butter, cheese and cream.
Even so, Chamber of Commerce leaders reckoned that many local families still had a family milk cow and those who didn’t own one would like to win one.
To lure the public to the event they would give away, to one lucky participant, a thorough-bred Holstein milk cow, that was record registered and tuberculin tested, and had a calf, valued at $350. With inflation that’s about $6,545.88 in today’s money.
The hype actually started in December 1929 when the Chamber of Commerce invited business owners, members and non-members, to a big meeting to hear about a great move to be made shortly. The Chamber of Commerce was going to sponsor one of the greatest business-building programs ever seen in Pacific. Some 36 local businesses signed on to help promote the event.
They advertised the day to a fair the well and attracted the support of almost every business in town.
James McCaughey chaired the Cow Day Committee. Charles Eggers, Val Brandt, Lawrence McHugh Jr and V.R. Butler were on the committee.
A banner headline across the front page of the Pacific Transcript topped an article that said, “It is expected the largest crowd ever seen in Pacific for many years will be present for this occasion.”
A Mr. Shields with the Pevely Dairy Company was so impressed with the idea that his firm wanted to cosponsor the event by donating half the cost of the cow. He noted that all the people in the district shipped their milk to Pevely in St. Louis.
The Missouri Dairy Council hyped the upcoming event by persuading the Transcript to run an article in its front page boasting that a producing milk cow was worth two horses.
“A cow giving 35 pounds of milk a day produces in that milk what is known as 10.4 therms of energy,” the article noted. “To produce the same number of therms in the form of useful work would require a team of two 1,500 pound horses working for eight hours.”
E.A. Brown, Chamber of Commerce president, held a special meeting, noting that the cow to be given away would be on display in Pacific week for the entire week before the festival. By that time, Mr. Brown said that through the generosity of Pacific business men, between 20 and 30 other prizes would be given away.
Mr. Brown said the Chamber would hold one more meeting before the big day. Everyone was invited to attend the meeting, even non-members, to “see just what the Chamber of Commerce means to your community.” The Chamber of Commerce had only been in existence for two years at that time.
Two days before January 17, the advertised day of the festival, one of the most severe winter storms seen in recent memory blanketed the area, blocking all roads with six inches of snow and plunging temperatures to 22 degrees below zero.
Mr. Brown called another special Chamber of Commerce meeting and rescheduled the festival to February 1. In case of bad weather on that day, he said, Frank Fries had offered to donate the use of his grand new hall as a location for the event at no cost to the Chamber.
Not to be outdone by Mr. Fries, Leber Hall organized a Cow Day Hot Tamale Dance for Saturday night following the afternoon festival. The Lebers advertised in the PacificTranscript, inviting its readers to come and celebrate Cow Day, when “an unusually large crowd is expected to turn out for a real big time.”
The big event did not disappoint. The still extreme cold moved the celebration to Fries Hall which was crowded to capacity with visitors from every town in a twenty-mile radius of Pacific.
The Chamber of Commerce leaders were happy with the success of the event, which they said would bring about better breeding, and lay the foundation for bigger events in Pacific.
The new Chamber of Commerce honed its planning skills, organizing business members to petition Franklin County government to improve roads leading into the city, convince the Federal Higway Commission to send an alignment of the new interstate highway through Pacific and organized the 1932 festival that celebrated the opening of Route 66, which was a smash hit, complete with one-day-only Hollywood Style electric lights illuminating the face of Sand Mountain.
