SPRINGFIELD - The hog-calling and husband-calling contests at Sunday's Illinois State Fair had a modern twist this year.

Joel Prendergaast, 34, of Steward, won third place in the hog-calling contest by pulling out his cell phone and saying, "Hogs, this is Joel. I'm coming to the barn. You'd better be behaving!"

Prendergaast's friend, Ellen Nord of Bloomington, later won third place in the husband-calling contest. While Nord told the audience that she is not married, if she were, her husband would come quickly upon being called.

Nord said she and her three sons arrived at the contest shortly before the start. A woman approached her and Prendergaast and encouraged them to enter both contests. After Prendergaast performed his call, Nord's 11-year-old son, Evan, told Ellen that she should perform a similar scene for the husband-calling contest.

She complied. After several attempts using a honeyed voice and telling Prendergaast that she was waiting for him, she bellowed, "You'd better not be talking to those pigs again!"

Prendergaast rushed to the stage, shut his cell phone, put it in his pocket, and in the words of Nord's mother, Diane Nord, he "in a lineman's tackle, grabbed her, threw her over his shoulder, and ran off the stage."

"I was merely taking the kids down there. I thought the kids might enjoy the show," Ellen Nord said.