116 3rd St SE
Cedar Rapids, Iowa 52401
Time Machine: Bossy on the loose
How a runaway cow was the talk of Cedar Rapids in 1954
The corner of First Avenue and 10th Street SE is in the middle of Cedar Rapids’ Med Quarter. Signs everywhere attest to it.
But on Friday, Sept. 10, 1954, anyone standing at that corner, which had a couple of gas stations and a Firestone store, witnessed a mini-rodeo.
It started when farmer John Rickleff of Central City decided to send two of his Holstein cows to the Wilson & Co. meatpacking plant in Cedar Rapids.
John Allen of Viola picked up the cows in his truck and proceeded down First Avenue East. When he turned left onto 10th Street, the cows shifted to the side and the stock bed fell off the truck. The cows found themselves on the pavement.
Initially stunned, they recovered quickly.
Attendants at the service station on the corner ran out to assist Allen in rounding up the cows. Police soon joined the effort.
One cow was caught immediately.
The other — a 3-year-old Holstein dubbed Bossy — apparently had no intention of getting caught, perhaps knowing what awaited her at Wilson.
The word “boss” is derived from the Dutch word “baas,” meaning “master.” That seemed to fit this Bossy to a T, though most bosses don’t weigh around 1,000 pounds.
On the run
Bossy swiftly headed down 10th Street, where she was caught between Second and Third Avenues.
A dozen men, including some police officers, restrained her, dragged her back to Second Avenue, and tied her to a traffic signal pole while waiting for another stock truck to arrive.
When the new truck showed up, even with the men pulling her with ropes and police wielding an electric prod, Bossy resisted mightily.
More than 100 spectators watched as she struggled against the restraints. She gave a violent twist, snapped the ropes that held her and took off in the opposite direction from the packing plant.
A dozen people took off after her. She ran toward the railroad yards, then disappeared from sight. Her pursuers looked for the fugitive cow for more than an hour in the rail yards, backyards, streets and alleys.
“Neighbors passed the story from house to house, then stood on their porches to watch the parade of police motorcycles, police cars, the vehicles of newsmen, volunteers and the just-plain-curious,” The Gazette reported in its Sept. 11 edition.
Several hours passed before a railroad employee, who had been on top of a railcar, reported seeing Bossy jump into the Cedar River and swim about 250 yards to an island about a mile upstream from the Quaker Oats plant.
Allen, the truck driver who was probably wishing he’d stayed home, rented a boat and headed to the island. He found Bossy amid the underbrush and tied her to a tree until he could gather a crew and return for her the next day.
Capture
On Saturday, five men — Rickleff, the cow’s owner, Delmar Philips of Anamosa and John Allen, John Danly and Bobby Danly, all of Viola — struggled through the island’s overgrowth and trees to get to Bossy.
“Almost all of the fight had gone out of her when the five men reached her,” The Gazette reported.
Pulling a subdued Bossy behind them, the men waded across to the riverbank and hoisted Bossy ashore. There she was loaded into a truck, tied securely and taken to Wilson’s.
All in all, rounding up Bossy took almost five hours.
Still, Bossy had won an extra day of freedom … and people had a good story to tell.
Comments: D.fannonlangton@gmail.com
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