Bart the bull has made a comeback in Glenview.
After being voted off the Wagner farm last month because of safety concerns and a comment about Bart’s randy ways, a Glenview Park District steering committee made a U-turn Wednesday night and voted a reprieve.
Steering committee member Norma Morrison, who reversed her vote and sponsored the decision to reconsider Bart’s fate, said that in more than 47 years in Glenview “few issues have aroused as much interest and comment.”
“I am approached in Dominick’s, Walgreens, the library, my hair salon, everywhere by residents demanding that Bart be allowed to stay on the farm,” she said.
After voting last month 7-5 to banish Bart, the vote Wednesday was 9-1 with one abstention to keep him. The only no vote came from committee member Henry Hill, who said he was still concerned about safety issues that he says motivated the original decision.
Hill was the person responsible for the remark that caused the uproar when he made an offhand joke that Bart’s activities might be too mature for the young audiences expected to visit the 19-acre farm at Lake Avenue and Wagner Road.
“And who’s going to explain to Johnny what the cows were doing?” Hill was quoted as saying last month.
The Glenview Park Board will have the final say in a vote expected in July. But for now, as Chris Warren, co-chair of the committee, put it: “The bad boy of the barnyard, Bart, is back.”
A committee has been working on a master plan to restore and open the 1850s farm to the public as an operating, educational farm. Members maintained that it wasn’t the sex, it was the violence they were worried about with Bart.
“The media coverage of this has been so screwed up,” said committee member Lou Marohn, who abstained from voting. “The whole reason was safety, not that we didn’t want to have little children see what bulls do in the field. That was a throwaway line.”
Bart, who weighs between 1,200 and 1,400 pounds, was placed in a separate pen within the barn away from people.
The Glenview Park District purchased the Wagner farm for $7.2 million last July. A steering committee’s master plan will be presented at a public hearing on June 4 at the Glenview Park Center.
“Someone who knows something about bulls and breeding should make the decision,” Cathy Crowley, who co-chairs the committee, said Tuesday. “One, because of the safety issues, because bulls are not exactly gentle. The other (reason) is, if all your cows are serviced by the same bull you have a lot of inbreeding and you don’t provide as good a cow.”
The committee recommended that the park board allow Bart or a successor remain on the farm.