Thursday, November 27, 2014, 11:25 pm — Bright Eyes, 1934, was on TCM tonight … When it was over, I went in search of Charles Sellon photos, Uncle Ned Smith (“SMITH, not Smythe!”) … Lo and behold … Shirley Temple and Tillie, a gift calf from the children of Tillamook, Oregon on her 9th birthday, 1935 … at her Hollywood home …
Tillamook’s Headlight- Herald, April 4, 1935, labels Tillie a Jersey … I beg to differ … She looks mighty like a Guernsey to me!
Update, Sunday, November 30: New photo identifies Tillie as a Guernsey, at Adohr Farms, Reseda, CA … with her “playmate Dinah” …
Tillie is mentioned in Shirley’s autobiography, Child Star:
“[In 1943] photographer Andre de Dienes was assigned to pose me on a haystack at the nearby Arden Dairy Farm, coincidentally the home of Tillie Temple from Tillamook, my gift cow from a distant birthday. Dressed in cowboy boots, blue jeans, blouse, and a bulky cable-knit sweater, I fluffed out my hair and stretched out in what I assumed were seductive poses most lying back in the hay sucking on a piece of straw. After a few rolls of film de Dienes complained that my outfit was shapeless, and maybe too much. Rolling my jeans to the knee, I exposed both calves. Not just what he had in mind, he said. Let’s take off the boots, for starters. Then, how about a little more off-the-shoulder with the blouse? For a third time, I rebelled. Pin-up photos were perfectly okay, particularly if the legs were like Betty Grable’s. Contrived cheesecake was for starlets, and I wanted no part of it.”
Update, July 8, 2015 : Move ahead 27 years … I was a Tillamook kid, with my own Guernsey calf, Java Jive … in the Cow Catchers 4-H club …
August 1962 … Tillamook County Fair … Java and I on the right … in the days when golden Guernseys filled the fields … Now they’re filled with black and white Holsteins.
Movies, Of Course! 