The summer I was 10, I had an Elsie the Cow T-shirt. It had been a freebie at a swim meet, and so a bunch of my friends had the shirt as well. As it happens when several people have an identical item of clothing, you’d often find a group of us riding our bikes around the neighborhood, all sporting the same shirt. If people didn’t know any better, they might have though we were a young gang of gung-ho dairy lovers. But no matter how we felt about milk, the main reason it was a popular shirt was because it looked good.
Some T-shirts are better than others, and Borden’s marketing department had done well with this one by making it a red-and-white ringer tee with a clean graphic in the upper right-hand corner. Yep, that Elsie shirt was pretty fashionable for the early 1980s. Heck, I even remember wearing it on the Fourth of July with a pair of blue shorts for what I believed to be a stylish, patriotic look.
I hadn’t thought about that shirt in years, but I was recently reminded of it while cooking with sweetened condensed milk, which featured a smiling Elsie the Cow on the can. You know the one I’m talking about. But did you also know that sweetened condensed milk has Texan roots? Yep, its inventor, Gail Borden, spent much of his life in Texas and contributed to the state’s early history.
Besides conceiving canned milk, Borden’s life was packed with achievements. For instance, during his time in Texas he helped write the state’s constitution; was a primary developer of Galveston Island; created the state’s first topographical map and surveyed the future site of the city of Houston. (He also famously got into a brawl with Sam Houston, but the details on that are a bit murky.) And, there are even two Texas towns and a county named after Borden.
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