Standing proud atop a billboard that overlooks Interstate 35 in Central Temple, this red and white fiberglass Hereford guarded the city like a sphinx for more than 30 years. But on Thursday morning, a worker lassoed the cow with a steel cable, and in a matter of minutes a crane lowered it onto a flatbed trailer.
“Our biggest concern, we couldn’t find anyone who knew the weight,” said Danny Coppin, the contractor in charge of the roundup.
Turns out the bull is hollow. The crane operator said it “felt like it didn’t weigh anything at all.”
Temple residents and businesses used the bull to help people find their way long before Detroit added navigation devices to their automobiles. B.W. Ponder owns an automotive service shop that sits in the bovine’s shadow. His business cards read “Next to the Big Cow.”
“We hate to see the bull go because it’s a landmark and easy for people to find us. We had an agreement, we knew the bull was always his,” he said, regarding the owner’s right to take it down.
Ponder is now looking on the Internet for a replacement bull. So far, no luck, he said.
Ponder’s office manager, Debra Santos, said she remembers the bull from the 1970s when her grandparents took her to the steakhouse that originally hoisted the big cow into the sky.
The bull came down because a local real estate man, Reuben Marek, bought the old steakhouse building that until Thursday sat in the animal’s shadow. The new and old owners made a gentlemen’s agreement.
“I told Reuben I wanted that bull,” said Lee Mays, chief executive officer for Indeco Sales and Maco Manufacturing. “I wanted to keep it for a marker.”
Mays said he got the bull (it’s actually a steer, he points out) in 1981 when he bought the building that sits below it. Although it was originally a Sirloin Stockade, the owner at that time was serving Mexican food. The cow had changed, too.
“It had horns on it, and a jalapeno on each side,” Mays said. “I had an old boy get a bucket and he painted it … and got the horns off.”
With the bull now on the ground, Mays is going to do some cross breeding.
He said he is going to paint the bull black because he keeps Black Angus cattle on his Troy ranch. He plans to set the bull on top of a pole near his business at Enterprise Road and I-35. Motorists from both directions would easily see the black bull at its new home.
Over the years, Mays said he has turned down a few offers. A man from the Panhandle town Hereford offered him $5,000 because their high school football team is called the Whitefaces and he was looking for a mascot.
Although Mays didn’t sell his steer, the man apparently succeeded. An alumni Web site for Hereford High School features a picture of what looks like the Temple bull riding in a trailer.
This is the second bull on 57th Street to come down within a month.
This past summer, Clem Mikeska corralled the bull that stood atop his restaurant since the late 1960s, just before he razed the old restaurant and moved into the new one next door. His bull now sports a fresh coat of paint and a CM brand on its left flank. The same crew that took down the old Sirloin Stockade bull will lift Mikeska’s refurbished bovine to the top of his new restaurant within a few days.
Mikeska said he bought his bull in the mid 1960s from a traveling salesman with a truckload of fiberglass animals.
Across the interstate, Ponders can only hope that guy is still in business.
