A herd farm mentality.

Serving as a fledgling elementary principal in a rural school in southern Minnesota, Bruce Klaehn was sitting at his desk on a spring afternoon when a 1st-grader came running into the office, shouting breathlessly to the secretary: "My teacher said to tell Mr. Klaehn there are cows in the parking lot."

Skipping the step of hearing his secretary repeat the announcement, Klaehn

glanced out his office window to find, indeed, cows in the school parking lot. Located a short distance outside of town, the school was directly across the road from a farm. Without checking for existing policies, Klaehn scurried outside. "Several perplexed cows looked at me in the same way I looked at them," he recalled.

Having grown up on a farm, Klaehn was skilled in cow herding. Assuming the cows belonged to the farm neighbors, he instructed his secretary to contact them while he took command of the school lot. A minute later she shouted out the door that the neighbors apparently were not home. Klaehn was on his own.

With the savvy he learned many years before from his grandfather and father, Klaehn managed to single-handedly return the cows to the farm yard, open the gate and usher them safely back to their home and keep them in the cowyard until the owners returned.

Said Klaehn, now the superintendent in Eyota, Minn.: "Their 'Oh, thanks' response to my actions told me that I had simply done what any self-respecting rural neighbor would have been expected to do, whether in jeans and T-shirt, or a dress shirt and tie."