Heartful memories

I experienced the most wonderful pang of nostalgia today, so delicious I intentionally prolonged it by doing a little online searching. Serendipitously, I came across an image of Elsie the Cow, Borden milk products' long-time mascot, bringing to mind happy hours collecting Borden’s ads from my mother’s Ladies Home Journals and McCall’s in the 1950s. How I wish now those had been kept, as the artistic cartoony images, full of color, motion and frantic humorous activity, were nothing short of glorious.Elsie, ever and always sporting her necklace of fresh black-eyed Susans, her hubby Elmer the bull, and kids (calves?) Beulah, Beauregard, Larabee and Lobelia, were the very epitome of the ideal family from the 1930s at least through the 1950s when I was smitten. Elsie even had very shapely, if slightly hairy, legs.
These thoughts make me long to have in hand one those magazine pages again, to inhale its inky fragrance, touch its shiny slickness, and to revel in the lush pictures of happy bovine home life. Searching ebay for “Elsie Borden” turned up 105 hits, including many print ads that I’m tempted to buy, like a drug to soothe an old addiction, and several Elsie dolls, none of which exactly matches my memory of a similar toy I forgot I had ever had to treasure. I’m not the only one who looks back on Elsie’s hayday (no pun intended, of course) as halcyon. Memorabilia in fine condition commands a fine price in the early 21^st century.
One unspeakably sad thing about having a grown-up perspective on all this is that I now know what goes in to making Elmer’s Glue-All. I wonder if Elmer knew that when he took the job as spokesbull for Borden’s glue products?

I'm sorry I can't credit the source of the image; it appears in many places on the internet.