Goose is cooked for bull on the lam
Dec. 22, 1956: “Runaway Bull Cows Restaurant Patrons,” read the headline in The Times after a bull took off down the streets of Vernon, literally running for its life.
“A frightened bull, with four police cars in pursuit, led a two-mile chase through the Vernon and East Los Angeles industrial district, stampeded customers in a drive-in restaurant, threatened to gore an elderly woman and finally was roped by a cowboy as it pawed the hood of a Vernon police car,” the newspaper said.
The yearling bull escaped as it was being taken to the slaughter pen at the Swift Packing Co. on Vernon Avenue, The Times said. At one point, on Olympic Boulevard, it “made a dash for a woman” who “jumped into an excavation while police used their sirens to divert the animal.”
The bull eventually was cornered between buildings on South Chicago Street, where Al Mendeville, a cowboy working at the Union Stockyards, rode to the rescue on horseback. The Times said the bull “left a memento” for police: “a hoof print on the hood” of a 1957-model patrol car.
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