In Ohio: A Fowl Spectacle

By Spencer Davidson

The Japanese television crew is scrutably perplexed. "Very unique," the director grins bravely, contemplating a scene his team has flown half a world to film for a Tokyo special on the Guinness Book of World Records.

Their perplexity is understandable. Ten feet above their cameras, a wiry man perches on a white wooden platform that stands out sharply, in the bright Ohio sun, against the green pasture beneath. His T shirt bears the words INTERNATIONAL CHICKEN FLYING ASSOCIATION, along with a picture of a chicken in full flight, wearing a flying helmet. Perched on the man's own head, helmet fashion, is a large yellow-and-white knitted chicken.

Periodically he bends down, takes a genuine chicken from the outstretched hands of someone on the ground and inserts the bird into a large rural mailbox on the platform. Then he seizes a plumber's helper and, like an artilleryman ram-rodding home a shell, nudges the chicken's tail feathers and plunges it into flight. Beneath the launching platform is a triangular corral, several hundred feet long, fashioned with snow fences. In it waits a squad of small boys cradling large fish nets. As each chicken takes flight squawking in protest and spraying feathers, a boy dashes along its trajectory to net the flyer at its point of touchdown with the skill of an Izaak Walton landing a plump trout.

For first-tuners like the Japanese, it is a stunning panorama. There are 3.6 billion chickens in the U.S. but only 170 of them have made it to the 8th Annual International Chicken Flying Contest. It is held, as usual, in the rolling hill country of eastern Ohio, on the 1,100-acre Bob Evans farm at Rio Grande, a crossroads community on two-lane Route 35 between Chillicothe and Charleston, W. Va.

Chicken flying is of a piece with turtle derbies, crab races, frog jumps, armadillo rallies and possibly even buffalo chip tosses. There is no entry fee. Owners may enter as many birds as they please. Contestants are divided among four categories according to weight, and prizes of $25, $10 and $5 are awarded for the longest flights in each class, along with bright blue, red and yellow ribbons. Any chicken flying farther than the "world's record" --297 ft. 2 in., set in 1977 by a Japanese blacktail bantam named Kung Flewk --receives a cash prize of $500. What makes it fun is the unpredictability of the chickens. Some fly straight and true, or reasonably so, like Kung Flewk. Some refuse to fly at all, even with encouragement from a plunger. Some shift into reverse on takeoff. Since chickens are not natural aviators at the best of times, in a brisk breeze they can be pitiful to behold.

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.

At 80DEG it is about 25DEG hotter than chick ens like. With no pores to sweat through, they cool off by panting. And a panting bird, as any chicken-flying handicapper knows, is not likely to travel far.

White Flyer is the first contestant. She escapes again at the mailbox, is netted in midair. "Fowl start," rules the judge.

Finally plunged through the box for an official start, the bird veers sideways into the crowd sitting behind the platform on folding chairs. Eleven more are launched with equally poor results before a hen named Stephanie soars 60 ft., to the cheers of the congregation. For most of the next two hours, birds with names like Chick en Little, Chickenmauga, Opeck, Granny Kluk and Herb W. Cluckerman drop stonelike or circle back over the crowd. Apparently unruffled by the Shake 'N Bake threat, Otis, when his turn arrives, drops out and down. Kamikaze literally lays an egg en route to the mailbox and can manage only an exhausted 5 ft.

Flights are interrupted from time to time for fowl play. Children are invited to scratch for nickels in two sawdust piles. The winner is Dan Deaver of Gallipolis, a beaver-toothed boy who has been "nine for a week now." He finds 27 nickels. Blond Kathy Markwood, 8, of Rio Grande is top girl with 15. They receive a silver dollar and the honor of being photographed with Evans. A human in white chicken suit demands entry. A lengthy rule-book search discloses no weight limit to keep him out but he is disqualified be cause he cannot fit through the mailbox.

The high point of the day, however, comes early. The 45th bird, Lola B., a 15-oz. common bantam with a proud black tail, breaks cleanly from the mailbox, then swings sharply to the left and lands atop a sheep shed beyond the snow fences. A tape-measure team figures her flight at 302 ft. 8 in., which betters Kung Flewk's old record by 5 ft. 6 in.

Owner Sherwood Costen, 66, a shy retired municipal employee from Point Pleasant, W. Va., raised his winner and her four sisters as wild birds. While less savvy contestants carried their fowl around feet first in the hot sun, Costen cradled Lola in the shade of a thick maple.

After the day's final flight, Costen shyly accepts the $500 check and the big black and yellow world's champion rib bon from Host Evans. Two hundred T shirts have been sold, the sarsaparilla has given out and the Olympic torch is flickering low. Wiping the fried chicken from their fingers, the satisfied spectators slowly meander toward the car pasture. "See you all next year," says Evans, as a state policeman helps the campers and pickups thread in among the giant semis barreling along Route 35. From one departing truck, a rooster crows an unprintable reply. -- Spencer Davidson

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