The Cow Palace

Five miles south of downtown San Francisco, within easy howitzer range of the Transamerica Pyramid, sits a monument to free-span roof systems called the Cow Palace..... a rectilinear barn, built before the rediscovery of the dome, with a main floor plenty big enough for a rodeo, circus, or monster truck crushorama. There is enough off-floor seating for, say, eight thousand folks. During my first full winter in California, I was inside the Cow Palace three times.
The Grand National Horse Show and Livestock Exposition is held yearly there. A few memories linger from my attendance of this event..........The Sons of the Pioneers, looking more like the Grandpas of the Pioneers, lowered from the catwalks on a swaying stage, singing "Cool, Clear, Water" while twenty roving bartenders, with icechests on their chests, worked the crowd, yelling "Beer, Cold Beer."........Monty Montana, straddling a bored paint gelding, twirling two ropes at once, and smiling too widely for the teeth to have been his own........Bobby DelVecchio, from the Bronx, New York winning the most cowpoke event of them all, bullriding......and Bud's Pride, touted as the first fertile Beefalo bull, (cross between a shorthorn and a buffalo) bringing a cool 1.3 million bucks at auction.
The second visit to the Cow Palace was for a performance by the Rolling Stones. Mick Jaegger made his entrance to the Cow Palace in the bucket of a black self-propelled cherry picker, dressed in a navy pinstriped, London-tailored, three-piece serge suit, no shirt or shoes, driving himself down the center isle of the floor, swooping way out over the fans as he sang "Lady Jane."
The third time came after I saw a sign-up sheet in the City Lights Bookstore for volunteers to set up folding chairs for a speech by E. F. Shumacher, author of Small is Beautiful. In the book, Shumacher sets out guidelines for minimalist lifestyles and voluntary simplicity, which is a reasonable enough idea unless you are already living too simply to be able to afford food. I did wonder why the Shumacher folks had chosen the Cow Palace. Maybe small didn't seem all that pretty when it came to book sales. I signed up. I wanted to look a bit deeper into the guts of the big old building.
I carried chairs until both hands were blood-blistered. Fifteen minutes before kickoff, when it was becoming evident that the one hundred voluntary simpletons in attendance were going to be rolling around in the big old building like BBs in a boxcar, I wandered out to the lobby to have a smoke. There I met Abraham, a beefy professional janitor, wearing a faded Cow Palace Staff vest, and nipping on a pint of mid-'70s Mogen David 20-20..
He poured a gulp of the syrup into a styrofoam cup for me We stood in the very same industrial-strength doorway through which Mick had driven his rock and roll contraption a month earlier. Five young devotees were arranging the stage. When it came time for the sound check, a short, eager woman took a microphone and began.... "To be, or not to be, that is the question. Whether 'tis nobler....."
Abraham took another slug of the Mad Dog, looked over at me, and said, "Ya know, ya learn something new every day on this job. I kinda figured this Small is Beautiful thing was going to be some kind of Midget Pride gathering, but, by God I always thought Willie Shoemaker was a man."