Cathy Young – creator of the name “Udders & Putters”

Around the mid-1980’s, we started to figure out that our farm wasn’t just an ice cream store serving a few sandwiches anymore. We noticed that our Guests were spending more time hanging out on the farm, visiting with the cows and enjoying the picnic tables we had placed around the farm. We were becoming a destination place for a lot of Guests – who enjoyed bringing their family to Young’s for the experience of visiting our farm.

This got us to thinking – since we have so many folks visiting us – what else might they want to do – then, as now, many Guests drive 20-30 miles or more to visit us. If we wanted to keep them coming back – what might we add to the visit and experience of visiting Young’s? What would fit? How could we grow the business and gain new Customers?

By the time we got to the late 1980’s, we were still thinking about what might be a good next step. This is about the time a visit to a Disney Institute class helped us figure out our mission statement – We Create Fun for Our Customers. This, more than anything else, helped us to focus on what is important to our Guests and it guides us daily. But we still didn’t have a clear idea on what was next.

A family vacation trip that included a visit to Ben & Jerry’s in Vermont, Stew Leonard’s Dairy in Connecticut, and a couple-day stop in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina helped us figure it out. The miniature golf courses – there seemed to be 50 or more of them in the Myrtle Beach area – were beyond anything we had seen! Perhaps this idea – but with a farm theme – might work at Young’s. So, we got to work in visiting some courses in the state of Ohio and interviewing builders of this specialized attraction.

We decided on something that had features that fit on a farm – a watermill, a windmill, a barn (complete with mooing ‘cow’ when you get a hole in one on the last hole) complete with running waterfalls, great landscaping, nice lighting for night time hours and music. But what to call it? Young’s Miniature Golf just didn’t sound all that exciting and probably wouldn’t make much sense at the time to our Guests if we had called it that.

A few days later, Cathy Young suddenly came up with a great name – she said you use a putter for miniature golf, right? And cows have udders, right? That rhymes and sounds like fun! So we took some poetic license and called it “Udders & Putters”. It was perfect.

Since then we’ve added a driving range, batting cages, another 18 holes of miniature golf, Cowvin’s Fast Slide, Moovers & Shakers and Cowvin’s Kiddie Corral to the Udders & Putters family of things to do!