France had its beheaded Marie Antoinette, New York had its Headless Horseman dashing around Sleepy Hollow, and Colorado had Mike...the Headless Chicken. Mike certainly wasn't the head of the roost, but rather a randy Wyandotte rooster destined to be the centerpiece of a Sunday chicken dinner. Mike's almost-hard-to-believe saga began on September 10, 1945 in the western Colorado town of Fruita. The nation was just emerging from the darkness of World War II and before that the Great Depression with its promise of a chicken in every pot.

Farmer Lloyd Olsen, Mike's master, picked the handsomest rooster from the flock and led him to the chopping block. Olsen, knowing his mama was coming for dinner and her favorite pick of the chick was the neck, left as much of the neck as he could on the chicken's body as brought the sharp axe down, cleanly severing head from neck. Now if you've been around a farm much, you know about whacking a chicken's head off. It's fairly gruesome. The chicken flutters and stutters about the farmyard for a minute or so, blood spurting from the gaping wound, before collapsing in a bed of feathers. Mike, however, was not your normal run of the farm chicken. He stumbled about the farmyard, undoubtedly looking for his lost head and when Farmer Olsen returned an hour later to retrieve the body for plucking, he was shocked to find Mike going about his rooster business in the yard. Fluffing his feathers, preening for the lady hens, and trying to peck for seeds, quite unsuccessfully of course. He slept that night in the coop, tucking his naked neck under his wing, and in the morning Mike's attempts to crow the dawn sounded more like a strangled gurgle.

That next day the farmer decided that Mike was maybe worth more alive in his present decapitated state, than as a Sunday chicken dinner. So he tweezered grain and dripped water with an eyedropper down Mike's gullet. After a week Olsen was astounded that his headless chicken was not only alive, but seemingly thriving. So he packed him in a crate and carted him to the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. An incredulous scientist there poked around Mike's neck, determining that the ax had just missed the jugular vein and what was left had clotted and sealed up. Enough of the brain stem as well as a single ear attached to the neck was enough to keep Mike off the carving board.

For the next 18 months Olsen and Mike's manager/agent resembled chickens running around with their heads cut off. Mike, his head, preserved in alcohol in a glass jar, and his roost barnstormed the nation, traveling to such exotic places, for a chicken anyway, as New York City, Atlantic City, San Diego, and Los Angeles. People everywhere lined up to pay a quarter to gawk at Mike. Scientists examined his neck and shook their own heads in disbelief. Magazines and newspapers published photos of the curious chicken and the Guinness Book of World Records celebrated his freakdom. Life Magazine dubbed him "Miracle Mike." Animal rights activists too got in the act, saying it was terrible that a chicken without a head was allowed to live and that the farmer needed to finish his hatchet job. Most folks though said Mike seemed so happy and healthy, and so well-adjusted for a chicken without a head that they just didn't see a problem with him living in that headless state of...errrr....no-mind.

Mike finally went to that big barnyard in the sky one night in an Arizona motel when he began choking on a corn kernel. Olsen couldn't find the eyedropper in time to clear Mike's open throat. Years later Lloyd Olsen remarked in a newspaper interview that Mike was "a robust chicken-a fine specimen for a chicken except for not having a head!"

The legend of Headless Mike lives on at Fruita, which celebrates its feathered, headless friend with an annual Mike the Headless Chicken Festival every May. The event features a 5-kilometer "Run Like a Headless Chicken" race in the morning, raw egg tosses, chicken jokes, chicken bingo with the numbers determined by where chickens land on a grid, and a chicken lunch with all the fixins' of course. If you want to have a peek at Mike, then check out the artistic five-foot-tall sculpture of Headless Mike, welded from assorted metal pieces, at the corner Mulberry and Aspen in downtown Fruita. Now that's something to crow about!