It was September, 1945. World War II had been won. The depression was over. Finally, there was to be a chicken in every pot.
But Mike had other ideas.
Mike was a Wyandotte rooster. A Fruita farmer named Lloyd Olsen cut off Mike's head. After running around like a chicken with his head cut off, Mike didn’t die. There was just enough brainy stemmy stuff left at the top of the neck to keep him going. As Churchill had said about Britain just a few years before, when the outcome of the war was still in doubt, "Some chicken! Some neck!"
Mike lived for 18 months. His owner kept him alive by feeding him grain, one piece at a time. He drank from an eye-dropper. Olsen got him in Life Magazine, called him Miracle Mike, and dispatched him on a tour of the country, charging people a quarter to take a look.
Finally, Mike choked to death on a kernel of corn far from home, in an Arizona motel room, an end not so different from other doomed freaks like Janis Joplin and John Belushi. No one knows where is buried, but that hasn't stopped Fruita from cere-brating their famous fowl.
The Mike The Headless Chicken Festival is held annually. T-shirts are available, and details can be found at www.miketheheadlesschicken.org, which also displays photos of the real Mike.
On the corner of Mulberry and Aspen in Fruita is a statue of Mike, maybe five feet tall. But it is an "artistic" rendition, made of old metal implements like horse shoes and hand tools. It's on a street featuring other sculptures having nothing to do with headless chickens. If you did't know the Mike story, you might walk right past the piece.
Fruita has a better statue, a twenty-foot tall dinosaur. It's at the entrance to downtown in a grassy park, menacing the road. THAT is where a new headless chicken statue should go, at least that big. Too many towns have dinosaurs, but only one has a headless chicken.
