This page is dedicated to my dear mother-in-law, Jane O'Donoghue,
a loyal fan of the Purple Cow

As we began our homeward trek, we spied this, and just had to stop.

This Purple Cow was perched near the roof of an Espresso Restaurant.

<sidenote: I have never in my life seen so many espresso restaurants as I have, here in Seattle. They are everywhere, and range from three foot square kiosks leaning awkwardly at angles on empty lots, to large, spacious "bistro"-type places. I am ashamed to admit I will never be a true Seattleite, for I do not like espresso.>

Burgess was a drafting instructor at the University of California at the time he wrote the quatrain. He would lose his job, shortly, when he and some of his fellow members of the writing circle known as Les Jeunes would commit an outrageous act of prankersterism. Cogswell, a noted teetotaller, had given the City of San Francisco several statues of himself holding a glass of water. A concealed pipe kept the glass filled. Burgess and his confederates altered one of these monuments in a way which no biographer has found fit to describe.

The humorist went on to write several books of humor including Goops and How to Be Them and Are You A Bromide?, in which he introduced a new word for "boring" into the language. He memorialized his San Francisco days with a poem called "The Ballad of the Hyde Street Grip" and two collections of writings from the period. He died in 1951.

Until that day of reckoning came, however, Burgess was haunted by the one mistake he felt he ever committed in his life. Despite his accomplishments as a writer and an editor, he would find himself hounded by the silly quatrain he had written for The Lark. It was his claim to fame and he despised the inevitable recitation which would follow when people found out. Some years after he wrote "The Purple Cow", he composed a sequel:

Ah yes, I wrote "The Purple Cow"
I'm Sorry now I wrote it
But I can tell you Anyhow
I'll Kill you if you Quote it!

excerpted from www.notfrisco.com