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The "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, buy hams from the adjoining country store, even take home Watkins Cream of Camphor liniment and working $65 potbellied stoves. Whatever money comes in offsets the day's expenses, in particular the piles of fried chicken catered free at contest's end. "Last year's losers" is the running joke.
"I was 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 contest.
Many of the family groups now assembled are three-generational, something you seldom see in urban America any more. Picnic lunches appear. But in an area heavy with fundamentalist United Methodists, Southern Baptists and Nazarenes, there is not one good ole boy guzzling beer or passing a bottle. Sarsaparilla is the champagne of the day.
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, Ohio, "I just hope she gets rested."
Owners trade training notes. Four young men from Youngstown, wearing orange shirts that identify them as manager, coaches and trainer of a leghorn named Otis, have a special technique. Otis, at 109 oz. the heaviest entry, was driven past a Colonel Sanders store before the competition, they insist, and threatened with Shake 'N Bake. The best training routine seems to be to find an irascible female. The deepest instinct of roosters is to get to the ground fast and establish control over some turf.
Precisely at 1 p.m., three young girls in vivid red and green medieval page costumes escort Evans into the pasture to light a homemade Olympic torch that flares up from a 5-ft. metal container. The weather leaves something to be desired.