Bull wasn’t tamed, just sleeping

Cliffside’s recent excitement over a prize western bull roaming the countryside subsided with his capture, but today had broken forth anew as the apparently tamed animal showed evidence he had merely been sleeping, rather than broken.

Several weeks ago, Pick Biggerstaff collected a $5 reward for corralling into his barn the wild steer which has been the source of considerable worry to its owner, Robert [“Tubby”] Hawkins. The beefer had been the object of a long and extended chase over hills and valleys and was so lean when finally caught that it was deemed necessary to feed and fatten him.

Romeo, as he’s called, ate as contentedly as a Carnation cow, and to all appearances was at the same time getting fat and tame. But that’s just what his keepers thought.

Hawkins hired a big truck and some men to take the steer to the slaughter house. After much work they returned without Romeo.

A second detachment was sent under personal direction of Biggerstaff, a man who tips the scales at over 200 pounds. He selected Hawkins and Ern Wilson, likewise 200-pounders and announced the steer would be brought to slaughter without any trouble–but he hadn’t consulted old Romeo.

When they flipped back the door there stood Romeo in the bright sunshine. He blinked his eyes several times, jumped high into the air, shook himself and begin to tear the fence down while the alleged captors swung to ropes that held Romeo. The second shift gave it up as a bad job, the men uttering direful opinions as they trudged homeward, under the weight of mud and humiliation that had come to them.

Biggerstaff offered the suggestion that old Romeo wasn’t tamed, he had been sleeping. So far, as he is concerned, he said this morning, while so sore and weary he could hardly operate his barbershop, he’s through worrying with that steer.

He declared his purpose to have that bull out of his barn.

“How you gonna get him out?” asked a friend.

“I don’t give a ____, I mean for him to get gone,” Biggerstaff dismissed the question.

This clipping is thought to be from the Forest City Courier, sometime in the 1940s. According to Jack Biggerstaff, who provided the article, Romeo was a long horned steer that Tubby Hawkins had bought from somewhere out west. “Pick” Biggerstaff was Jack’s father. The pictures above did not accompany the actual news article.