Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, May 20, 1994                   TAG: 9405200045
SECTION: CURRENT                    PAGE: NRV-10   EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY 
SOURCE: By MELISSA DeVAUGHN STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG                                LENGTH: Medium

EVEN AFTER 25 YEARS, EACH SHOW'S UNIQUE|

But the Blacksburg Middle School science teacher was unruffled. After 25 years of helping his pupils put on a dairy show, he has seen it all.

"You left the Head and Shoulders on her," he told the three girls while hosing down the nervous Holstein heifer. "She must've had an allergic reaction" to the dandruff-control shampoo the girls had used to give their heifer flake-free fur.

Although he's never had a cow turn blue, Utin said similar scenes have taken place over the years as kids try their hand at halterbreaking dairy calves and presenting them for show.

This year's event, the 25th annual Jon Utin Dairy Show, will be held Saturday at 9 a.m. at the Bill Adkin Center at the Virginia Tech Dairy Barns off Southgate Drive. And although Utin has gotten used to minor catastrophes like those of the blue calf, he still expects this year's show to be unique.

"It's always new - everytime," said Utin, an Oxford, England, native who majored in dairy science at Virginia Tech before coming to teach at the middle school. "It's just like teaching ... each year you get a whole new bunch."

This year's group, 46 of them, are halterbreaking 15 Holstein and Jersey dairy calves, all supplied by Virginia Tech. At Saturday's show, the pupils will demonstrate everything they have learned about their calves during the past three weeks of training: how to back up, walk with control and turn on command. The calves will be judged on how good they look, too, after being washed and groomed by the pupils. And every pupil will get a ribbon.

"We'll have the kids here at 4:30, 5 in the morning," Utin said. "I'd really like for them all to sleep in the stalls with their calves - that's how it's done in real shows. But getting them out here that early is good because they just get to stand here and see and smell - that sort of thing. The milking's almost done by then and they get to see that the world's already at work."

Utin isn't the only person looking forward to Saturday's show. Kalyn Butler, 11, has been waiting since she was in elementary school to train her own calf. Her father and grandfather both work at Tech's dairy barns and she is one of only a few students who live on a farm.

"This was one of the things I really looked forward to [in middle school]," she said. "If I do good, my dad might get me to halterbreak some calves this summer."

For others, this is their first experience around livestock.

"I never really cared much about cows," said 12-year-old Lindsay Doyle who lives in town and has been on a farm only a couple of times. "I thought they were just for milk, but they really have personalities - like there's this one calf named Runaway because all it does is run away, and ours is Oreo because she likes Oreo [cookies]."

Utin is pleased with this year's pupils and their calves - even the blue one - and is grateful that Virginia Tech allows the pupils to work with the calves.

"On the first day we came here, the kids went up one wall and the calves went up another. Now they aren't nervous at all."