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Moos-ic Man-'Don't have a cow man'

One of his Holsteins had fetched a record-breaking $265,000 at the New York State Fair in Syracuse. This miraculous cheesemaker was expected to squirt out fifty thousand pounds of milk a year. According to The New York Times, she was only one of about two hundred fifty cows owned by Lennon and an unnamed partner. Said a spokesman for John and Yoko: “They’re not eager to sell too many Holsteins because of their love for the animals.” Well, for Chrissake, at $265,000 per, how many do you need to sell? In any case, there were two hundred forty-nine cows left, and I was determined to find them. They were, after all, John Lennon’s cows. They might be the closest I’d ever get to Lennon.

I had a vague idea where they were. The Times article that had reported the original dairy deal back in 1978 was datelined Delhi, New York. So I rented an inconspicuous subcompact and hit the highway.

Delhi is a sleepy little burg nestled in the Catskill Mountains, in the midst of real all-American farm country. There’s a Main Street, a Grand Union, and a classic diner. It was there I repaired to drink coffee and pick the brains of the locals.

By the second cup I’d learned that the smart money in the area was on Dream Street farms, a dairy conglomerate that administered some fifteen properties and specialized in Holsteins, the Cadillac of milk cows. Having no doubt that our hero was in with the smart money—since Lennon had stopped making financial boo-boos around 1975—I resolved to call Dream Street’s office.

A secretary picked up the phone, and I told her I wanted to talk with the boss about John Lennon’s cows. She asked me who I was, and like a fool I told her. She vanished from the line like a rock sliding under water and returned a minute later to tell me, “We are not at liberty to discuss anything pertaining to the Lennons’ holdings.” Lennon, who used to get himself into glorious hot water by giving people answers to questions they hadn’t even asked, has a lot of people keeping secrets for him now.

But cows just aren’t that easy to hide. They’re large animals. There are ways to find them.

Conveniently enough, Delhi is the seat of Delaware County, and the county clerk’s office was stashed in an eighteenth-century red brick courthouse within spitting distance of the diner. Half an hour spent amid the vast and dusty record books, poring through the handwritten entries, netted me plenty to go on. In December 1977, Lennon had bought eight parcels of land covered by four separate deeds. The assessed value of the properties was put at $427,000, and the rule of thumb is that the actual worth of the land is half again as much. The total area was just over 1,600 acres. If you have trouble grasping what an acre is, picture a football field. Picture 1,600 football fields, and you know how much of the Catskills Lennon owns.

The only problem was, his parcels weren’t in a nice big block. They were scattered all over the place. It seemed as if Lennon had wanted to buy up the corners of the county and fill in the middle later. But I got hold of a map that was only slightly smaller than the county itself and spent the afternoon trespassing.

It turned out to be sort of hard on the car. There aren’t many roads up there, and John Lennon, fugitive from fame, seemed to have a penchant for hideouts way back in the woods. But after miles of wrong turns and rutted roads, one of which punched a hole in my muffler, my luck changed. As I went roaring down county road 18, the information on the map seemed too simple to believe: one of the Walrus’s holdings was supposed to be right at the side of this paved and civilized thoroughfare. I watched for landmarks, crossed my fingers, and at length arrived at the Argyle Farm, a member of the Dream Street group.

I pulled off the road and approached the farmhouse. At the white front door I concocted a spiel. This time I’d be smart. I’d lie. I knocked on the door and a woman appeared—blond, husky, and carrying a baby. She wasn’t Yoko Ono.

I told her I was interested in investing in Dream Street and asked if I could have a look around. She said she’d fetch her husband, and did so with a yell.

“Interested in Dream Street, are ya?” the farmer asked, when his wife had passed along the story.

I nodded.

“Well, you can’t buy this farm,” he said. “This here’s John Lennon’s farm.”

Bless the farmer’s guileless rural heart, which holds that some things, at least, are sacred. He’d no sooner lie about the ownership of stock or land than falsify his name.

“Technically, though, it’s part of Dream Street,” he went on, after I’d made a suitable gesture of being impressed. “I work it for ’em. Be happy to show ya around if ya like.”

His name was Bill Furner. He took me to the barn and showed me John Lennon’s cows. They were huge dappled creatures, man-high at the rumps, with fine square skeletons, backs broad enough to play poker on, and udders the size of kettledrums. It was milking time, and the distended sacs were veiny with weight and strain, the teats rigid as a high-pressure hose. The cows lowed and mooed, and I wondered if they had any inkling that their owner had done amazing things a long time ago.

“Lotta money in those cows,” Bill Furner said, going straight to the heart of the matter as he made his rounds with me. He smacked flanks and petted foreheads. “All top quality,” he said, pointing to the family tree above one of the beasts. “That Yoko Ono writes up a mean pedigree. She’s the one who really knows the business, ya know.”

“Yeah. Well, I’ll bet Lennon loves these animals, though,” I said, just to keep the conversation going. After all, I’d read that in the Times. “He come up here often?”

Furner looked at me sideways. “I’ve never even met him,” he said, “and I’ve been working the place a year.”

“But it’s his farm,” I said. “How does he know what goes on?”

“Oh, Dream Street takes care of that,” said Furner. “Sends him a computer printout every week. Tells him everything he needs to know.”

So much for the pastoral fantasy, I thought. The cows are only real estate with teats.

“Besides,” Furner went on, “he’s got someone who sort of oversees his interests up here. Woman named Penny King. Takes care of one of his other houses, over in Sidney. She grows vegetables and eggs for him, too, and ships ’em down to New York. I hear he’s pretty fussy about what he eats.”

“Vegetarian, I hear.”

“To each his own,” said Bill Furner, slapping a cow. “Me, I like a nice piece of beef.”

I thanked him for the tour and headed for my car. I’d already opened the door when something else occurred to me. The paper said that Lennon owned two hundred fifty Holsteins—and there weren’t more than fifty or so in the barn.

“Hey, Bill,” I shouted back, “where are the rest of his cows?”

Furner gave an elaborate shrug. “Who knows? Some in Vermont maybe. Virginia. I hear he’s got farms all up and down the coast.”

My God, I thought, the man’s in a class with Frank Perdue.

Esquire

This is taken from this main article which is very interesting too .

https://classic.esquire.com/article/share/a72a9993-b08e-4f41-957a-34d9e2f9ea60?date=120920&source=nl

Cow keeping in his past too
(And yes everyone seemed to run a pub there's about 10 of my ancestors that did )
http://www.davejoy-author.com/the-john-lennon-connection.html