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Is the 'cow in the cupola' story bull? (continued)
But what about the cow? Asked for evidence that the prank occurred, people cite Merrill Burlingame, the late MSU historian. In Burlingame's 1968 book on MSU's history, there is this single sentence:
"Another time, a cow appeared to have wandered alone and unaided up the switchback stairs to the fourth floor of Old Main, then up the narrow stairs to the little cupola which for years ornamented the top of the building."
Does Burlingame slyly reference students who professed no knowledge of how the cow reached its precarious perch? Or is he honoring the legend while rejecting it as history?
The way Lashaway heard it, "A group of students took a calf up to the platform and tied it to the railÉPresident Atkinson then ordered the removal of the rest of the structure. We did find a pencil note on some of the framing that closed the hole, noting it was done in the late '20s. No reason was memorialized."
Is it possible it never really happened?
"I don't know of a college that hasn't got that story," said Pierce Mullen, MSU professor emeritus who co-authored the exhaustive MSU history, In the People's Interest. "It's ubiquitous. You might be able to persuade the cow to go up the stairs, but how would you get it back down?"
One version of the story holds that because the cow couldn't get down the stairs, it had to be killed and brought down in parts.
"That building was originally the whole university," Mullen argues. "There were offices, there were classrooms, and that's where the library was. I don't know that the building was ever unoccupied long enough for someone to get a cow into it."
To test Mullen's ubiquity evaluation, one simply may Google "cow + prank" to be rewarded with 247,000 hits. In the first five pages of hits, there are claims of similar pranks at MIT, Auburn, and in the Thomas Jefferson-designed rotunda atop the University of Virginia's main building. Then there's Neil Steinberg's book, published in 1992 by St. Martin's Press -- If At All Possible, Involve a Cow: The Book of College Pranks.
The legend of the prank is so durable that homage is paid to it in the modern cupola.
"MSU carpenters mounted a small plastic cow in a high-up, difficult to access part of the cupola to commemorate the cow legend, next to a small plaque noting the names of those who worked on the replica cupola," Lashaway says. "I've seen this cow personally."
MSU history professor Robert Rydell, another co-author of In the People's Interest, gets the last word.
"We just don't know for sure," Rydell writes. "But it is a story worth milking for all it's worth."
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