While searching for something else in the on-line Alto Herald newspapers, I came across a poignant front-page story with a picture about man’s best friend.
In the latter part of September, 1956 there were three people killed in a head-on collision about 10 miles south of Alto on Highway 69. After the bodies were removed and the wounded hospitalized, a wrecker brought the two cars to Alto and placed them on the Pearman Chevrolet lot.
The next day a black dog was seen lying under one of the cars. When anyone walked up to the car, the dog would come out, wag a stubbed tail, size them up and go back under the car.
This continued until he was hungry and thirsty enough to allow Warren Taylor Whiteman to feed and water him, but he never got out of sight of the cars.
When the story came out in the November 22, 1956 issue of the Herald the dog was still hanging around the Whiteman Food building, watching the wrecked cars, no doubt hoping for his master’s return.
We don’t know what happened to this dog, but just the year before a similar story had been told in the January 1955 Herald. In this case the old Crosby house in Linwood had burned, and a little black dog sat patiently in front of the ruins, waiting for his family to come back home.
Apparently Editor Weimar knew his readers well enough to know that they liked dog stories. He used a lot of them from all over the world as fillers. There was the man-bites-dog story from Denmark where an owner cured his dog from catching chickens by biting him on the neck. There was the dog who inherited a sizeable estate, the dog who stamped out a fire with his paws and saved his master’s life, the dog who climbed trees, and the dog who guarded his injured master so well that authorities had to shoot him in order to take the man to the hospital. Then there was the dog whose young owner put him in the dryer after being admonished for allowing him to come into the kitchen with wet paws.
Mr Weimar must have really liked the story of the German shepherd named Brownie in Pittsburgh whose friendly behavior in court got him a reprieve after his owner had been convicted of keeping a ferocious dog. He used that one at least 5 times during the summer of 1948. Or maybe the article was just the right size to fill the space he needed.
In February of 1955 a special pet named Mackie got his own front-page obituary, complete with picture of him with his 13-year old master. Mackie was given to Jimmy Brunt when Jimmy was a baby, and had been his constant companion all his life.
Originally published in the October 16, 2013 edition of the Cherokeean
The Stella Hill Library Archive site is full of dog pictures – I had to keep myself from adding more. The featured image this week is an Alto classic of Toby Sartain’s dog restroom.
I’ll start the extras with a clip from the 1955 Herald mentioned at the end of the column. It’s pretty rough, but you can probably still see how much Jimmy Brunt loved Mackie.
Next we have my favorite (only) childhood barber, maybe yours also, Tom Black and his beloved foxhounds.
Speaking of favorites, here’s my Texas History teacher, Terry Ted Moore, with his hound.
