(via sunjournal originally printed 10-24-2006 - bangor daily news)
SHREWSBURY, Vt. (AP) - It was 20 years ago that a love affair between a moose and a Hereford cow caught the imagination of a nation and literally put this tiny mountain town on the map.
For 76 magical days in the fall of 1986, a bull moose variously dubbed "Bullwinkle," "Josh," "Bruce" and "Valentino" by townspeople and tourists visited Jessica the cow in her pasture.
Photos of the two nuzzling against the bucolic mountain backdrop became iconic after the national media latched onto the story. Thousands of visitors flocked to the farm to watch the two animals.
Shrewsbury gained such notice that locals theorize that's why mapmaker Rand McNally decided to include the town of about 1,100 on a new world map.
Larry Carrara, the now retired farmer who owned Jessica, said he still gets fan mail.
The most recent letter was postmarked Oct. 12 from Lexington, Ky. Signed by the Anders family's four children, it asks if the moose ever returned to Carrara's farm after that fall.
He never did.
"The night before he left, he slept under our bedroom window," Carrara recalled. "I told my wife that night that I knew he was leaving. Sure enough, the next morning when I went to work he was gone and no one has seen him since."
On Sunday, residents gathered at the Shrewsbury Library for a showing of video footage from the time.
Carrara says he thinks what made the story catch on was that people were looking for something to smile about.
"Mostly, everything else was bad at the time," he said. "We'd just lost the astronauts (in the Challenger disaster of 1986), baby Jessica had fallen down the well and Gary Hart was getting caught cheating. You get so sick of seeing and listening to all the bad news that you need something good."
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