A mission of the National Western Stock Show is education, and 4-year-old Mya Jerkins got a nose-full at the annual parade Tuesday.
“Shoo-eee, cows stink,” she exclaimed as 30 longhorns trotted around the corner at Wynkoop and 17th streets.
“Nooooo,” urged her mother, Suzanne Jerkins. “You love moo-moos.”
Just then a cow slid to its knees making the turn onto 17th, and the young girl’s eyes swelled seemingly to the size of horseshoes.
“Maybe this wasn’t a good idea,” said her mother. “But hopefully, she won’t ever forget it.”
Sights and sounds accompanying the smells:
• Two police officers on bicycles debating the movie tune played by the Burlington High School marching band. (It was the theme to “The Magnificent Seven.”)
• The homeless men at Larimer Street waving and hooting at the rodeo queens in the Dodge Ram Rodeo Truck.
• Tiyo, a 6-year-old Labrador retriever, looking cool in a miniature black cowboy hat at Market Street. “He’s cowboying up,” said friend Pam Moser as the dog’s owner, Diane Casciano, snapped pictures.
• Grand marshal Baxter Black, the famous cowboy poet, dressed in red, white and blue, calling “go longhorns” to the cattle from atop his honorary red stagecoach.
• Stock show volunteers racing on stick horses.
“Ha’h,” called Jim Sylvester to his toy steed to win the “race.”
The stock show revived the parade tradition in 1985 — five years after this year’s grand marshal moved to Colorado, practically penniless, in a beat-up old Plymouth Fury, he recalled.
“It’s a great honor,” Black said of Tuesday’s grand ride, turning to tell a joke as he slapped the two men driving his stagecoach on their shoulders.
“I’m taking these guys with me to every bank I rob.”
The stock show is about nostalgia and Western pride to grandfather and Colorado native Wil Harris, who has been bringing his children and grandchildren to the parades for nearly two decades.
“It reminds us of how we got here, as Westerners,” he said, nodding and pointing a finger at a nearby parade goer wearing a businessman’s wool coat and wingtip shoes. “What’s here today in Denver is not what it used to be.
“I think I like it better the old way.”
Joey Bunch: 303-954-1174 or jbunch@denverpost.com
