So too are her fans, who now span several generations. Since 1959, her butter cows—lifelike sculptures made of about 500 pounds of butter each—have been a popular annual tradition at the state fair. "She draws a tremendous crowd," says Marion Lucas, the fair's manager. "In Paris, people go to see the Eiffel Tower," says Dean Wright, 60, a sociology professor at Drake University in Des Moines. "In Iowa, they see the butter cow. It's the quintessential Iowa experience."
Known to Iowans as the Butter Cow Lady, Lyon is as much a fixture on the 400-acre fairgrounds as the pig races, the blue-ribbon livestock and the brightly glowing carnival rides. Continuing a tradition started by the Iowa dairy industry in 1911, Lyon has created more than 100 butter sculptures, including full-scale renderings of Elvis Presley, Garth Brooks and Iowa painter Grant Wood's American Gothic. She has also demonstrated her craft at state and county fairs in Illinois, Kansas and California and on the Today show and Late Night with David Letterman. "She may be working with butter," says Brenda Mickle, who wrote The Butter Cow Lady, a book about Lyon, "but this is truly an artist at work."
Lyon discovered her talent somewhat by chance when she joined members of her sorority in a snow-sculpture contest at Iowa State University in 1948. She spent hours in icy weather fashioning a remarkably detailed horse. After awarding her first place, one judge—art professor Christian Petersen, a former student of Grant Wood—asked her to study with him. "He was demanding, but I learned a lot," Lyon recalls.
Creativity and accomplishment run in her family. The older child of Benton J. Stong II, a newspaper editor, and his wife, Elsa, a homemaker, Norma Duffield Stong was born in Nashville in 1929. Her grandmother Bertha Clark founded the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra, and her uncle Phil Stong wrote the book State Fair, which inspired three movies, including the famed Rodgers and Ham-merstein musical. "Now I'm at the Iowa State Fair every year," Lyon notes. "It's kind of like fate.
As was meeting fellow student Gay lord "Joe" Lyon, now 70, at Iowa State in 1949. She asked him out on their first date. A year later they were married, and the couple brought up their nine children on the family's prosperous 1,500-acre dairy farm in Toledo, Iowa, 75 miles northeast of Des Moines.
When Joe, then a member of a local dairy association, took his wife to a meeting in 1957, she saw her future sitting on a desk. "It was a picture of the previous year's butter cow," Lyon remembers. "I said, 'I can do better than that.' "
She soon did, developing techniques she still uses. Selecting a particular cow, she photographs it and prepares a life-size sketch. Then she builds a sturdy frame out of wood and steel. Containers of butter are left outside to thaw, allowing Lyon to grab fistfuls to slap on the frame. She uses carving tools and her fingers to mold the model to match her drawing. After the fair, she freezes the butter—provided by the Midland Dairy Association, which pays Lyon an undisclosed amount to sculpt the cows—and reuses it for up to five years.
Like many artists, Lyon has had her struggles. She has long battled manic-depression and in 1997 suffered a minor stroke. But after months of rehabilitation, she returned to sculpting—as well as to inspiring others. "Even if you live on a farm," says her son Eric, 45, a dairy farmer, "everybody ought to have a little art in their life."
Alec Foege
John Slania in Des Moines
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