After enjoying the annual Gowrie Independence Day parade along Market Street, dozens of area residents spent nearly an hour waiting for a cow named Spud to, well, crap.

The Xi Eta Sigma Sorority hosts its annual Cow Pie Bingo fundraiser every year during Gowrie’s Fourth of July events. The tradition started back in the 1980s or 1990s, several sorority members said. It eventually made its way back about 12 years ago, they said.

Members of the sorority sell tickets for $10 — enough to fill five game cards of 100 spaces each — raising $5,000. About half of that is given away as prize money, but some of the winners end up donating their prize money right back to the sorority.

The funds raised from Cow Pie Bingo go right back into the community and kids’ organizations, sorority member Neeley Hanson said. The sorority supports the Gowrie Skating Rink, Gowrie Pool, the Little Jags youth athletics program, the Southeast Valley Robotics Club and more.

-Messenger photo by Kelby Wingert
Spud, a 1-year-old cow, was the star of the show Monday afternoon for the Xi Eta Sigma Sorority Cow Pie Bingo fundraiser in Gowrie. Dozens of people gathered to wait and watch Spud make a deposit on the "game board."

Cow Pie Bingo is the sorority’s biggest fundraiser of the year, Hanson said.

“I think it’s just unique with everybody coming into town for the celebration, a lot of people aren’t from here, sometimes it’s their first time seeing a cow,” said Xi Eta Sigma member Kathy Carlson.

The way the game works is a cow is brought into a small pen set up with squares painted in the grass to serve as the game board, and whichever square the cow makes its deposit in is the winner. There are up to five winners — one for each game card — and they win $300. But those who come in No. 2, those who have squares adjacent to the winning square, are called “Good Neighbors” and win $25.

Sometimes, depending on where the cow pie lands, judges will have to come in to determine which is the winning square.

“It’s a crappy job,” Carlson said.

It’s always a guess as to how long the cow will take to “create content” on the game board — it could be minutes, or it could be two hours.

“It depends,” Carlson said.

On Monday afternoon, Spud, a 1-year-old calf, was brought by his owner, 18-year-old Carson Suchan, of Gowrie. Spud entered the pen and onlookers watched, anxiously waiting for him to drop some spuds.

“We were feeding him a lot (before we came),” Suchan said. “A bunch of corn, some water.”

But the 1,000-pound bovine just wouldn’t let go.

After a while, a couple of kids got tired of waiting and even tried to scare the crap out of Spud, to no avail.

A neighbor’s fireworks blast also failed to scare the poop out of the cow.

Finally, about 55 minutes after Spud entered the pen — just when people were starting to think he was just full of it — he did his duty all over the winning square.