1 of 2 Another Story: Griffin

Another Story: Griffin

Uncle Will Church had a Registered Shorthorn bull named Griffin. Griffin didn’t like anybody and he had scared the devil out of me a couple of times. One day I had gone out to the farm with Uncle Dave and Aunt Rachel to visit with Uncle Will and Aunt Ella. They were busy visiting and told me to go outside and look around. I wandered over to the chicken coop and checked out the hens and then headed for the barn. It was a nice, big, traditional looking barn. Naturally, it was red and had big doors on each end with a lane down the middle so you could drive a wagon in. There were good sized stalls on each side of the lane and you could either enter the stall from the lane or, each stall had a Dutch door on the outside of the building. The Dutch doors could be opened at the top to provide ventilation or to let the animals look out.

The barnyard itself had a really stout fence around it. The posts may have been railroad ties initially and strung between them was some quality 3″ or 4″ pipe that looked like it might have been drill stem from the oil fields.

I wandered down to the barn and leaned on the barnyard fence and looked around. I always enjoyed going into the barn and smelling the hay and the livestock. I slipped through the fence and started across the barnyard. I was about half way to the barn when around the corner comes Griffin. We were both surprised and it made him mad and just flat scared the hell out of me. I was straight across from one of those Dutch doors and saw that the top half of the door was open. I took off running and so did that bull. Being highly motivated, I was covering the ground pretty fast. Of course, so was Griffin. There wasn’t time to open that door. I got there just before Griffin nailed me and dived right over it. Yuk! The stall was empty but hadn’t been mucked out and I landed in the nicest, freshest, bunch of cow pies you ever smelled. I wasn’t sure what to react to…relief that the bull hadn’t killed me or the mess I landed in. I took a handful of hay and cleaned up my arms and shirt front. Fortunately, I had turned my head to the side and didn’t land with my nose and mouth down.

I peeked out the door to see where Griffin was and saw him over in the corner staring out into the pasture where the dairy cows were. I knew he wasn’t thinking about me so I went over to the other side of the barn, dashed across the yard and dived through the fence. There was another pen with a horse trough and a spigot to get running water so I went over there and started washing up. I rinsed my shirt out and hung it on the fence to dry. By this time, I’d been spotted through the window and Uncle Will, Aunt Ella, Uncle Dave, and Aunt Rachel all came out to see what kind of trouble I was in. And, as soon as they found out, they all started laughing and kept it up until they practically choked. I’m sure I was beet red in the face. As you can see, some 65 years later, I still remember it well.

Dave Thomas
December 9, 2013