Petaluma Butter and Eggs Day
Timo took to the tarmac with the Petaluma Chapter of Realtors in the Butter and Eggs Day's biggest and best parade to date, this sizzling hot April weekend.
Pictured here by our super-snapping pal Steph, Timo's taking the big bucks around town: a bumper check for $1,000 which was donated by the Petaluma Chapter of Realtors to the Petaluma Boys and Girls Club.
Over 30,000 spectators lined the leafy streets and shady sidewalks of Fourth Street, Kentucky Street and Petaluma Boulevard, wishing a collective Happy 150th Birthday to Northern California's friendliest home town by far!
We all know that Petaluma is the best small city to live and raise a family, and thousands of guests who flooded in for the parade and Sunday's bi-annual downtown Antique Fair, would surely have to agree.
And talking of Butter and Eggs, down at I Leoni on historic downtown's Kentucky Street, there's little question which came first. The chicken or the egg? The egg, of course.... incubated in the window with all the fine china and luxury linens of I Leoni that we modern day Petalumans have grown accustomed to.
This fluffy little looker pictured above is named Mary Claire after one of the I Leoni sales ladies. Mary Claire was a premie, showing up a couple of days ahead of plan. She must take after her owner, Teela Ridgeway, who has never been seen to sit down for more than two minutes a day! As well as being widely known for her fabulous Petaluma Gap grown Pinot Noir, Teela is a tireless personal trainer and aquatic instructor and so, it's no surprise that a chick from her rural vineyard estate would be first off the starting marks in the hatching department.
Back in the Gold Rush era of the mid to late 1800s thousands and thousands of Single Comb White Leghorn baby chicks were hatching like crazy on a daily basis. In fact, it is said that nine out of ten Southern Sonoma County residents were fully occupied by the production of some ten million pullets of eggs per year.
That's a lot of eggs to be rattling down the railway tracks and steam boated to the bustling Gold Rush metropolis of San Francisco and beyond. And according to local historians, this incredible ag industry rapidly raised this fledgling riverfront city's status from humble hunter's camp to the one-time richest city of its size in America.
Amazing what can come from one simple egg shell, isn't it? We're still enamored with the magic of poultry reproduction in these parts. There's nothing quite as pure as a little kid's squeal of delight, standing in front of a downtown store window and watching a chick hatch before his very eyes.
Petaluman Lyman C.Bryce actually invented the world's first practical chicken incubator just a mile or two away from baby chick, Mary Claire's birthplace in I Leoni's window! This fantastic idea of Bryce's brought the international spotlight to Petaluma as home of the world's first and only chicken pharmacy.
