Deal Dairy Provides Elsie for Borden's
By JEAN PAMPLIN
Special to The Journal
The Deal family dairy in Franklin County makes more than milk. Their jersey herd produces cattle the Borden Milk Company believes representative of "Elsie," their long-standing advertising icon. The company purchased one of its Elsie the Borden Cow mascots from the Deal Dairy and plastered her face on Christmas cards in 2004.
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Elsie's regal portrait, complete with daisy wreath about her neck, is a familiar decoration on Borden trucks and dairy related products.
Upon patriarch Charles "Bud" Deal's passing, Cookie Jarrell wrote in tribute, "Bud was laid to rest not far from his dairy and the family and cows that he loved." Bud received the Texas Jersey Cattle Club's first "Pioneer Award" for excellence in breeding and promoting Jersey cattle.
He and his wife of 59 years, Gracie, raised seven children, four of whom continue in the Jersey dairy business. They moved from Missouri to Texas in 1974, part of a three-generation dairy operation that at one time was the largest dairy in Franklin County. In 1979 Bud was inducted into the National Dairy Shrine. He was a conservationist, a believer in leaving the land better for future generations. He nurtured his land with care, and void of synthetic chemicals or fertilizers.
Before Bud died, most of the work at the family dairy had already been delegated to sons Alden and Jesse and daughter Johanna. Son Luke helped with special projects. The other of the seven children are Matthew, Tima and Rebecca, who lives in Florida.
"Daddy enjoyed visiting with the Borden people and he was proud to have supplied an Elsie cow," Gracie said of her husband. "In his younger years, he went all over the country to sales. Young people came to him because he knew all the pedigrees. That's one thing he never forgot, even until the time he died."
He was a Bible scholar.
"Daddy appreciated another man's fine pastures, but he never coveted them," said daughter Rebecca.
Near the Titus-Franklin County line, the Deal Dairy spreads out over fields north of Interstate 30. They've been supplying Borden with Elsies for about ten years, Gracie said.
"They choose us because our Jerseys have horns," she said. "We've got a cow named 'Pretty Horns.'"
She says Bud was "different, a non-conformist, a philosopher of sorts.
"I was 18 when we married and we lived with his parents on their farm in Missouri until Hanna was 2 years old. We moved to Texas with all seven of the kids and one pregnant daughter-in-law. Alden was the only one that was married. Now Luke has his dairy at Purley and raises Arabian horses. Alden has a dairy, Matthew is a plumber but lives on the farm and Jesse helps him."
The Deals brought three herds of Jerseys from Missouri. According to Gracie, the herd has produced championship dairy bulls though Bud never believed in artificial insemination.
"He thought it would ruin the herd," she said.
When she and Bud first married, they pasturized and homogenized milk and made butter and cottage cheese. They hand washed glass bottles.
"We're headed for organic now," she said. "The feed costs more, but then the price of milk jumps."
At Elsie's web site, www.elsie.com, you can learn of the 1930's "milk wars" that sparked ad campaigns featuring a variety of fictional cows until, in 1938, a live Elsie was singled out. A radio commentator who read the Elsie commercial amused listeners so that they began sending Elsie fan mail and she became the Borden spokescow. In 1939, the most beautiful, blue-blooded Jersey in a New York World's Fair exhibit was chosen as the new Elsie.
They created family with Elsie's "husband," Elmer and her first daughter, Beulah. In 1947, with war-time shortages behind, publicists decided it was a good time for Elsie to bear another offspring. In July, modestly sequestered behind drapes in a Macy's Department Store window, Elsie gave birth to a strapping bull calf. The contest to name him brought in a million entries from which judge's picked the name Beauregard in honor of General Beauregard's part at the Civil War Battle of Bull run.
By the late 1950's, the written ad was losing power to television. Attempts to animate Elsie flopped and slowly, she faded away, with the exception of the Elsie Daisy trademark that's still in use today.
In 1971, a series of animated television commercials revived Elsie's career. In 1997 Elsie and Borden cheese became part of the Dairy Farmers of America's manufacturing and product line, which was about the time the Deal Dairy began supplying an Elsie cow and a Beauregard for tours in Texas and surrounding states.
The Borden people, Gracie said, come irregularly for Elsie cows, "but they come every year for Beauregard. They come with a trailer nicer than the house I live in."
The Franklin County Arts Alliance wants to perpetuate Elsie's image and pay homage to the Deal Dairy. Alliance activist Jacque Bateman says plans are pending to erect a life-size Elsie cow on the east side of Franklin County, much as the group produced its "Udderly American" cow on the west side of the county, south of I-30. Elsie, of course, will be on the Deal Dairy.