Petaluma’s 50 years with Clo the Cow
By David Templeton
Source: Argus Courier
“When Gene first presented the idea to the co-op board, they thought Clo looked nothing like a dairy cow,” Benedetti says.
It is herd-ly possible to bull-ieve it, but Clo the Cow is turning 50 this year.
If you are un-mooved by this announcement, you clearly haven’t lived long in this cow-munity.
Clo the Cow — she of the sweetly smiling, tooth-filled face, the iconic, pun-packed billboards and the highly huggable bovine mascot costume — has indeed been delighting milk-drinkers and automotive passersby since 1969. That’s when Gene Benedetti, the founder of Clover Stornetta Farms (re-branded last year as Clover Sonoma) first came up with the idea of Clo, a cartoon cow, who would bring whimsically positive attention to the local milk producer, and differentiate the Petaluma-based company from all the other dairy farms in the area.
According to Marcus Benedetti, the grandson of Gene and the current CEO of Clover Sonoma, his grandfather’s brainstorm was initially met with head-scratching skepticism by Clover’s board of directors.
“When Gene first presented the idea to the co-op board, they thought Clo looked nothing like a dairy cow,” Benedetti says. “They didn’t understand it on any level. But they let him try one billboard as an experiment. For six months. I think that first billboard just said, ‘Support Your Local Cow.’”
People did more than support her. They fell in love with her.
Today, Clo the Cow is one of the most instantly recognized characters in Northern California. The often outrageous puns that frequently accompany Clo on billboards and other advertisements have become a kind of cottage (cheese?) industry. Originally, those puns were the work of legendary advertising man Jim Benefield. For years, the Clo drawings were mainly done by advertising artist Bill Neller.
Today, Clo’s look and ad copy are the primary responsibility of artist Anne Vernon.
To mark Clo’s 2019 milestone, the company has a number of treats and surprises planned for the entire year. The celebrations begin this weekend, with the opening of a two-month-long exhibition at the Petaluma Historical Library and Museum. Titled “Clo at the Mooseum: 50 Years Young,” the show will feature posters, mementos, advertisements, billboards and other artifacts of Clo the Cow’s career. The exhibit is paired with another show featuring photographs by Petaluma’s Scott Hess, of the popular book “On a River Winding Home,” authored with John Sheehy.
In addition to the museum show, the city of Petaluma is honoring Clo by naming her the grand marshal of this year’s Butter and Egg Parade, which bears the theme “It’s Always Punny in Petaluma,” an homage to Clover’s pun-happy efforts over the years.
“People really appreciate those puns,” agrees Benedetti. “But those jokes have had to evolve over the years. A while back, we did a billboard that said, ‘Tip Clo through your two lips,’ and it was a huge hit, because most people got the joke.” The humor, of course, comes from the phrase’s rearrangement of the famous Tiny Tim song, “Tiptoe Through the Tulips,” made popular in the ’60s as part of the television show “Laugh In.” Notes Benedetti, “Today, though, no millennial would understand that.”
Rarely has Clo ever created much cow-ntroversy, but there have one or two billboards that suffered a tiny bit of blow-back. There was, for instance, the time that Clover installed a billboard near Vallejo’s Marine World, with Clo in a scuba suit and the words “Jacques Cow-steau,” and obvious tip of the scuba mask to the famous marine biologist Jacques Cousteau. According to Benedetti, the nonprofit Cousteau Society briefly attempted to sue Clover, until the national media picked up on it. The Cousteau Society got so much feedback from Northern California fans insisting that being punned by Clo the Cow was actually a great honor, the organization quickly dropped its suit.
