The two colossal steers were met like celebrities.
As they strolled down a red carpet through the lobby of The Brown Palace hotel, past fine china tea cups and under an elaborate chandelier, the crowd jostled to get a look at them.
This is the 72nd year that The Brown Palace has invited the big prize winners in the National Western Stock Show’s Junior Livestock Show into the lobby, allowing the public to take a peek and have their photos taken with the Grand Champion, named Fu, and Reserve Grand Champion, called BFF.
In 1945, former Colorado Gov. Dan Thornton auctioned off two cattle for about $50,000 each. He arranged to show them off in the lobby of the Brown Palace and the hotel has invited winning steers every year since.
The Brown Palace also invited There With Care, a non-profit organization that helps families of critically ill children, to attend the event as an opportunity to raise funds and awareness of the group.
They help families in the Denver metro area and beyond with everyday tasks that have become more difficult due to their kids’ illnesses. The hotel hosted a fundraising lunch and ran a raffle for the charity.
“It’s such a part of Denver. Them choosing us is a huge honor,” said There With Care founder and executive director Paula DuPré Pesmen. The money will be used to help clients with things like car repairs or covering the cost of transporting parents to visit their children in the hospital.
Winners of county fair pageants helped usher the guests toward the pen holding the two bulls.
Adams County Fair Queen Avie Anemaet stood to the side of the line wearing a sash and ceremonial chaps. She and the other winners of county rodeo queen competitions — which she described as a cross between a riding contest and a beauty pageant — had been showing animals at the National Western Stock Show the previous weeks.
“I love being here and seeing how important it is for these kids,” she said of the teenaged girls from Texas who showed their animals Friday. They’re young, she explained, “and they raised world-class cattle.”
Lillie Skiles, 12, raised the 2017 Grand Champion at her home in Stratford, Texas. Fu, “like Fu Man Chu,” is a crossbred Angus and likely Maine-Anjou steer, who was to be sold at the Junior Livestock Auction Friday night. Her regimen for raising the 1,370 pound bull was simple. “I washed him and fed him every day,” she said.
Mikala Grady, 15, of Grandview, Texas, chose the name BFF— an acronym for “best friend forever”— ironically. The steer that won Reserve Grand Champion, was “ornery” as a calf, she said. “We weren’t really BFFs.”
Like Skiles, she also had a simple formula for raising her 1,369 pound steer. “I washed him two to three times a week, and rinsed him the rest,” she said. “I fed him hay, normal stuff.”
After the cattle are auctioned, they’ll be sent to a meat packing plant, said Brown Palace spokesman Mark Shine said.
The day in the lobby was a “grand send off” for the cattle, he said. “What better a way to spend their last day, than at the Brown Palace Hotel?”
