“Dogs lives are short, too short, but you know that going in. You know the pain is coming, you’re going to lose a dog, and there’s going to be great anguish, so you live fully in the moment with her, never fail to share her joy or delight in her innocence, because you can’t support the illusion that a dog can be your lifelong companion. There’s such beauty in the hard honesty of that, in accepting and giving love while always aware that it comes with an unbearable price.”
—Dean Koontz
I keep, in a prominent place, a very old photograph of a tiny boy in a handmade coat and cap, his tiny right arm sitting atop the dog seated beside him. His left hand, tiny and dimpled, hints at the toddler’s young age.
The smile on his face is what told me, the first time I laid eyes on this sweet black and white picture, that it was my dad. I pulled it from a box of photographs which my dad and I were going through to mark names on the back of each one. “Yes, that’s me,” he said. “The dog was Major, and he was my friend and protector.”
The English Shepherd is a part of my family story, too. When my grandparents were first married shortly after the crash which brought on The Great Depression, they decided to focus on their small dog business, raising English Shepherd puppies. By the time of my grandmother’s untimely death in 1946, they had sold and shipped by railcar puppies to all 48 states.
People within Ohio sometimes visited later to show how much they appreciated their dog. Dad told of one that even knew how to do math. “What is 2 plus 1?” the man would ask, holding his hand just so. The dog would bark three times, and the hand would quickly pat the dog.
“I was so disappointed that we didn’t keep that dog. I was sure he could have helped me with my schoolwork!” Dad said, with a grin.
My dad gifted me the hand-written record books his mother kept each year, her handwriting clear, her style concise. Each litter, sire and dam listed, with pups numbered, and names and address of where each pup ended up. Grandmother Helen made the dog food, her recipe found in one of these books. Together, my grandparents built small crates for each pup traveling by railcar.
Early on, they received $10 for pups. As the years rolled on, their reputation for producing the best overall working farm dogs was established, males being $25 and females at $20. My grandmother worked constantly at helping grow this business.
“She sat at her typewriter, typing out postcards, writing ads to be published in magazines like Hoards Dairyman and many newspapers,” Dad said. It was her work that grew the business and helped get the family through the tough years of the depression.
The black and tan English Shepherd was woven through so many stories my dad shared throughout his life, and we created many of our own on the farms my dad built.
Next week: Dog stories worthy of sharing
