Highest bid in over 20 years placed at Jr. Fair Sale of Champions

Saturday, July 24, 2010

By MISSY HARRIS
Inquirer Reporter
mharris@galioninquirer.com

Junior Fair Sale of Champions was held yesterday evening at 5:30, getting underway after a Junior Fair Board performance of the National Anthem. The excitement of the auction added heat to the already-sweltering show arena. The excitement further climbed over the breaking of records and of the exhibitors’ donations of proceeds of their sales to the Fair Board’s newly-established Building Fund, for a new building to be installed on the site of the current goat and maintenance barns.

The big news of the auction, though, was Jessica Millenbaugh’s breaking of her mother’s Grand Cham-pion Market Steer sale.

Each year, loyal fair-supporting bidders break at least a couple of records for highest bid in different livestock categories. Yesterday, several bids were broken once again, but one of them, in particular, was remarkable for several reasons.

The third record-breaker of the Junior Fair Sale of Champions was for a record held since 1987 — and it also broke the record for highest sale price for a Champion’s auction. Millen-baugh’s steer’s sale in the amount of $9,000 to McDonald’s owner Scott Nickell ($6,000), Sunrise Cooperative ($1,000), Dr. Wayne Collier ($1,000) and Horde Livestock ($1,000) brought what auctioneer Craig Miley called “bragging rights” to Millenbaugh.

In 1987, a steer shown by Millenbaugh’s mother, Janet (Leonhardt) Millenbaugh, set the sale record with a bid of $8,953. Until yesterday, that was the highest price paid for Junior Fair Live-stock.

“Breaking the record feels great,” Millenbaugh shared with the Galion Inquirer. The freshman-to-be at Colonel Crawford High School said she had worked with her champion steer for about a year, although she has six years’ experience working with steers in general. After high school graduation, Millenbaugh plans to continue with agriculture and attend OSU ATI to pursue a degree in agricultural business, with a dream of running her own livestock ranch.

“I’m proud as can be,” said Mrs. Millenbaugh of her daughter’s coup. Mrs. Millenbaugh reminisced about her own record-setting steer, too: “I remember when it sold (notably, also to a McDonald’s owner) I wouldn’t eat at that McDonald’s for years — well, nothing more than chicken nuggets, anyway. I didn’t realize that the owner had it at home in the freezer.”

Millenbaugh had declared that she would donate $500 of her purse to the Building Fund. When bids began to approach the record-breaking point, though, she enthusiastically offered to chip-in $2,000 if the bid broke her mother’s record. Nicholls and his co-bidders made the breaking of the long-held record possible, and enabled a family legacy of excellence to flower within the backdrop of the tradition that is the county fair.