Dog Days

"Arf!"

That's the way Little Orphan Annie's dog said it. The comics in newspapers were full of dogs. Pluto hung around with Mickey Mouse. He had the greatest set of choppers ever seen behind dog lips. He and Mickey spoke English. None of that "arf" stuff from Pluto. And there was Daisy. She lived with Blondie and Dagwood Bumstead. I was a child when her pups were born. They're still pups. A lot of little boys in comic strips had dogs for pals.

Yukon King was the king of radio canines. He was sergeant Preston's partner and together they cleaned out all of the baddies from the Canadian Northwest. His only competition of note on the airways was Buster Brown's dog Tighe. They hustled shoes. Our brains were soft already. Adventure and commercials both caught our interest. We didn't know that barking dogs on radio were Mel Blanc impressionists.

Filmwriters gave dogs bigger brains than the ones in their human co-stars. Rin-Tin-Tin was before my time. So was the pooch that hung with Spanky and Alfalfa and the rest of "Our Gang." But I remember "Lassie," the cerebral collie. She (or he) was the champion of all dogs of fiction and she (or he) was so good that she (or he) became a television star in later years and got U.S. citizenship as well. We didn't know she was a he. We didn't know Peter Pan was always a "she," either. We didn't know what subliminal was. We were kids.

Any boy who has had a dog has experienced a bonding that isn't understood by kids who never had one. Everyone talks to dogs. Say the right thing and a dog will wag his (or her) tail. A lot of dogs will roll over for a tummy-rub. They'll nuzzle up to people for attention. They'll beg at the table from new friends. They're good pals to strangers when they get on the proper wave-length with each other.

Dog and "master" is a misapplied identity. The dog can play relationships to a level that his master cannot match. The dog has more to gain...or lose.

Before we got a dog...That sounds patronizing, like "master." Anyway, before we got a dog I knew three dogs and I liked two of them. The Heffners, who lived next door to us had a beagle who answered to the name Paget. That's a good name for a dog. When Heffners spoke about Paget in the presence of strangers no one would mistake Paget as a son or daughter. Paget liked me because I fed him some food-stuffs in the evening that weren't on his menu and should have been on mine.

My aunt Lillian had a boxer. He was all muscle, hypertensive and frothy. He slobered on friends. When I visited her house I could take him for a walk. That's not accurate. He controlled the leash and dragged me to haunts of his preference, to trees that he favored. He resisted going home until he decided the "walk" was over. He wasn't to be cheated. He was fearless, curious and not always obedient. His name was Bunker. No mistaking that for a son or daughter. I think he would have been a lousy watchdog. He seemed to like everyone, greeting all sorts of humans with wiggles and wagging and globs of saliva from his leaky jaws.

Rumors said that chows were the most vicious dogs on earth. The breed changes when stories of dogs eating men get wide currency. In recent years Shepherds, Dobermans, Mastiffs, Rotweilers and Pit-Bulls have gotten the rap. When I was a kid it was chows and bull-dogs.

When I was six and went off to school I passed a house that had a chow in the front yard. He had a black tongue. Someone said he ate children. He observed little menus walking by. We soon took to walking on the other side of the street to lessen the chance of being dragged off to where he buried his bones. I was intimidated by the stories (and everything is true to children), so I walked another route and one day I crossed the street between two parked cars and was struck by a moving one. I could have been killed.

I blame it on the chow. Somebody had ideas about chows being mean and it was advice to be heeded. Somebody had advice about not running into the street between parked cars. We have to remember a lot of things, even at seven.

That dog might have loved kids. Dogs seem to have a goofy affection for children even if they get snappy with grown-ups. Shepherds seem to be that way. Is it a protective instinct? Rome was built on the site where a wolf suckled two orphans. Kipling's wolf-boy, A.K.A. Sabu, got the same maternal affection so it's confusing to hear horror stories of unprovoked attacks made by man's best friends.

We adopt dogs and they adopt kids. Dogs take a lot of poking and abuse from babies and pre-schoolers. The chow on Chew Street was lonely and didn't get hellos and petting that he might have relished. Who knows?

My mother's uncle Lewis gave us a terrier named Lee-Boy. He was moved from a quieter home in Easton (sixty miles north) and maybe that's unfair in middle age. I don't know about his reputation back in Easton, but I think while he was with us he bit a lot of people. He nipped me, my sister, my uncles, the hands that fed him, the mailman (who he was supposed to bite), the garbage man, the kids who came into our yard, and not a few who ran by. In those days if you got bit by a pooch you thought the wisest course was to avoid further contact. That's all! Lee-Boy snapped at a hundred kids and not much was thought about it because all of those meals were on his turf. The chow of Chew Street minded his own business and was feared because he had a black tongue and an exaggerated reputation.

Still, Lee-Boy was tolerated. He was our dog and we loved him (dispite occasional dog-bites).

We vacationed in Ocean City in 1941. Our landlord didn't allow pets. Lee-Boy was left at home and neighbors, Mr. Wilkins and Mr. Heffner, fed him and gave him water and probably talked to him. But he got sick. My father was called. Lee-Boy wouldn't eat, wouldn't drink water, wouldn't respond to talk. He was brought to our house at the seashore. My dad said the dog was home-sick. Despite familiar faces, familiar friends, our pet died. My father and my uncle buried him in a secret place.

This was a horrible crisis for me. I had never known any dogs that died, at least this way. I heard that dogs died, but in ways different than people. They were run over by trucks. They were poisoned by cranks. They were gassed by dog-catchers. They were murdered by meaner dogs. They might run away when they got old and go to what might be an equivalent of the elephants graveyard. Later in life I understood that dogs died from diabetes, from cancer, from stroke, from heart failure, from respiratory disorders. At six or nine I knew very little about how humans died. News was simplified for kids. "He was sick, and he died." We were spared the gory details.

We spent a lot of time talking to dogs. It might be our own. Often it was someone elses. We'd ask questions as often as we would give orders: maybe more often. Some people give their dogs Christian names like Barney or Gus or Charlie or Winston. Others stick to doggie names: Spike, Spot, Blackie, Butch. If they're pedigreed their names read on AKC programs like guest lists at a Newport cotillion, Veterinary medicine isn't enough anymore. There's a field of pet psychology. Anxious owners can send Morton or Flavian or just plain Fido out to analysis. Who do you recommend? Maybe Doctor Patrick Frankenstein.

Lee-Boy wasn't in dog heaven very long when my dad brought his successor home. A black Labrador Retriever, he was immediately dubbed "Blackie." Unlike his predecessor, he was everybody's pal. He was sleek and full of playful energy. I was his first friend and he didn't need to grow-up fetching ducks and snooping through the brush. He adjusted to kids. They gave him attention. "Here, Blackie," and he was off and running. He chased sticks and balls forever. At night he liked to jump up on the bed and curl up beside me, his pal. That was considered weird by my mom who looked daft at boys and dogs sleeping together. The hall, or the cellar was more appropriate (for the dog).

He gobbled food with the dignity of a Hoover vacuum-cleaner. He barked at cats. They viewed him with contempt — from a "safe" distance.

He lived with us for a couple of years and then (was) volunteered for K-9 duty with the army. He was the only member of our family that went to war. About the time when Ernie Pyle was killed in Okinawa, Blackie was also shot by a Jap sniper. Maybe the same marksman got both Ernie and Blackie.

It wasn't uncommon for a bunch of kids to go exploring with Prince or King or just Gus, someone's favorite dog, tagging along. Yo! Gus — or Blackie — was an equal and it was certain that everyone vied for his attention. A lot of dogs went out to the sandlot or the park or to the stream when their buddies went fishing. They would play in the tick-infested fields with wrestlers, race up and down hills, eat potatoes with their pals, lie in the shade on hot summer days. If a dog got sick, the kid would worry. If the kid got sick, the dog would go to pieces.

For a while kids and dogs are partners. If the dog arrived first chances are he's bigger than the baby-to-be playmate. What a wonder (for dogs) to see the kid eventually become bigger (than him). People who talk to their dog have no right to challenge that. Do dogs really think?

Young people who remember a new puppy's arrival have to be prepared to watch their pet grow old and die. The only kid who escaped the tragedy of time was Little Orphan Annie.

At the other end of the scale, dogs owned by old people may very well survive them. I had lost two dogs when I was young and now, at the edge of being old, I wouldn't want a pet that's almost guaranteed to survive me and be at the mercy of a stranger's whims.