Yukon's Biggest Celebrity In 1949: Grady The Cow

Yukon is home to such celebrities as singer Garth Brooks and actor Dale Robertson. But there's another star who's made headlines all over the world.

Friday, October 28th 2011, 7:25 pm

By: News 9


Darren Brown, News 9

YUKON, Oklahoma -- Yukon is home to such celebrities as singer Garth Brooks and actor Dale Robertson. But there's another star who's made headlines all over the world.

"When people come to do research y'know, we just want to have it available for 'em,"

This may not be the type of research you're thinking about however. We're talking about research of the bovine variety.

"This is a copy of the daily Oklahoman back from 1949, the day that she was sprung, February 26."

Actually we're talking about Grady the Cow. What's that, you don't know about Grady? Holy cow, she was only Yukon's biggest celebrity about 62 years ago.

You don't have to visit with a historian to learn all about Grady's story here in Yukon. All you really need to do is visit the children's section here at the Mabel Fry public library.

Grady was a cow that got stuck in a storage silo on the Mach farm in Yukon. And it took just days for her story to move across the nation. Pretty soon the Mach family was udderly overrun with letters and telegrams from folks wanting to help.

"This story just went as viral as it could back then, not like it would today," author Una Belle Townsend said.

Townsend knows all about Grady's story. She used to tell it every year to her elementary students.

"Each year I would write and tell the story to the kids, rewrite it the next year, and continued doing so till I finally decided to see if i could get it published," Townsend said.

That happened in 2003, and Townsend hasn't looked back. Like the city of Yukon, she's been milking Grady's story for all it's worth. She even has a Grady puppet that she uses to relate the story.

Grady did eventually get out of that silo, thanks to a newspaper guy from Denver. She lived to be 18 years old, became a local celebrity, and brought fame to her hometown. And by my calculations, that's not too shabby.

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