Bringing a Love of Animal Farms to Fairgrounds

Ione Lohrman was reared barefoot, smelling like cow, in a faraway land called Wisconsin.

It was idyllic, she says. Her grandpa would rise with the sun. After hours of milking a dozen black-and-white cows, he would load brimming buckets onto his wagon, which would clickety-clack on a gravel road that wound to the town creamery.

These kids must think this is a fairy tale, says Lohrman, of San Clemente, while watching suburbia pass by the pigpen at the Orange County Fair in Costa Mesa. “It’s almost like going to Disneyland. It’s another world.”

As a docent at Centennial Farm, the 75-year-old is peppered with questions each Tuesday during the school year and during the fair’s 21-day run, which ends Aug. 3.

The little ones, kindergarteners through third-graders, think the grocery store makes the milk. They wonder where baby piggies come from (mommy piggies’ tummies, the docents say).

And when it’s time for the animals to go potty ... oh, my, Lohrman says. One schoolteacher had to remind her kids of the word they weren’t allowed to use on the farm: “Yucky!”

Lohrman and nearly 70 other docents are living time capsules, with knowledge of an agrarian America that is foreign to most fairgoers. For Lohrman, Centennial Farm is a once-a-week slice of the rural life she left in the Midwest. With her patient answers, she tries to translate the purity of farm life to suburbanites, in hopes of reminding them of their kinship to the land.

The farm’s four acres sprout rows of tomatoes and strawberries. Plus, there’s a milking barn and pens of livestock such as baby rabbits and Angora goats. It is the $535,000 hands-on star of the fair and it’s open year-round to those who wish to walk through. The docents lead hourlong tours for nearly 50,000 children during the school year, and stick close to the animals during the fair.

Signs list factoids for those passing by: “Dairy goats -- Act of birthing: kidding.” But there always are questions at the fairgrounds, just down the road from South Coast Plaza. Visitors tramp through in velvet pants and transparent tops. Some carry wine glasses. A few have French-manicured toenails.

“You don’t have to touch me after you touch the animals!” snapped one woman to her son.

Enter Lohrman.

“Come here, Sweetheart!” she calls to a pregnant pig that she says weighs at least 600 pounds.

She christens all the pigs Sweetheart. Their hair makes the bristles on brushes, she says. The pigs are the smartest animals on the farm. (She usually omits that this is where bacon comes from -- why make a little kid cry?)

Lohrman cradles 1 1/2-year-old Daniela Casas as the girl waves goodbye to the snorting pig, whose snout is the size of her face.

“This farm is precious,” says her father, Joe Casas of Santa Ana. “We get so caught up with city life that these animals are a big deal. It’s something we should see every day.”

Most of the volunteers, says Agademics coordinator Evy Edelo, are retirees, some of of whom fondly remember their days in the fields.

Lohrman’s friend Frank Guerrero, 69, grew up on a Torrance farm lined with rows of cucumbers and squash and clusters of chickens and cows.

Yet when he showed his daughter a cow in 1957, she said, “Dad, I don’t see any bottles on it!”

Centennial Farm is Guerrero’s way of connecting with the earth. He sings to the kids about lemon trees. He asks them if brown cows make chocolate milk. (They don’t, but not every child gets that at first.)

Lohrman has a quieter style, with gentle mannerisms and a hint of Wisconsin in her voice. She listens, then steps in when appropriate, like the most polite of dinner party guests: “See, she’s chewing cud. She’s got four tummies!”

Lohrman, Guerrero and his wife, Margaret, 64, began carpooling to the farm after viewing an oxen demonstration at last year’s fair. Married to Phil, a “city boy,” for 57 years, Lohrman also works three days a week at a boutique in Dana Point.

The couple left Wisconsin so her husband could work as a roofer in a sunnier climate. They’ve been here for almost 50 years.

Her schedule Tuesday had her circling around the barnyard, from cattle to pigs to the milking barn. The setting brought Lohrman back to her grandfather’s dairy farm, where he’d squirt the cow’s milk to one side, giving the barn cats a taste.

Lohrman would climb in apple trees. The air tasted fresh. “You ran free,” she recalls, “like a wildflower.”

A few families walked through the barn, pointing at two red buckets full of cream. Not a cow in sight.

Is this, one girl asked, where they make the milk?