At Rent-a-Cow, Farmer Won’t Give You a Bum Steer

--A Rhode Island farmer has an idea for a truly moo-ving experience: Adopt-a-Cow. When Steven Penagakos bought a 180-acre farm near Hopkinton, he knew that he didn’t want to raise cattle for slaughter. So he decided to lease the placid animals as pets. “It’s like a cow country club,” Penagakos said. “I know this all sounds a little off the wall, a little helter-skelter. What we’re trying to do is have an operating farm and not go broke in the process.” For up to $400 plus weekly maintenance fees of $15 to $20, adoptive parents can get a framed color picture of their cow and can name the animal, visit it once a month and have parties on their cow’s birthday. When the cow reaches maturity, parents can sell it or place it in the farm’s breeding herd, Penagakos said. They earn up to $400 for every calf born. So far, six people have adopted cows. Susan Penagakos said Adopt-a-Cow Inc. is “for the guy who has everything but he doesn’t have a cow.”

--The sky was the limit as the marriage of Wanda Phillips, 34, and John Bolton, 42, got off to a flying start. The couple exchanged marriage vows seated in the tandem open cockpits of a 1930s-vintage PT-17 Stearman biplane 1,500 feet over Morehouse Memorial Airport at Bastrop, La. They responded by radio to the Rev. C. R. Venable, a passenger in an S2B Pitts Special in the wedding formation that included about 10 aircraft. “It’s kind of appropriate because flying is our life. So that’s what we did,” Bolton said. The bridegroom, a flight instructor and airport manager, has been flying for 18 years. His bride is about five hours away from earning a private pilot’s license. Friends and well-wishers on the ground listened to the ceremony through a public address system. “When the preacher asked, ‘Does anyone object,’ we had a parachutist come out of one of the airplanes,” Bolton said. The couple will fly to southern Florida and then on to the Bahamas in a few days for their honeymoon. They will pilot the plane themselves.