Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Big Mutt
John Reese, il. Rod Ruth
1952, The Westminster Press


It was not the kindest thing to dump a soft, spoiled, city-raised dog out in this lean sheep country, in the worst blizzard the Northwest had known in a generation.
But they did it.


A vacationing New York City couple, spooked by a massive winter storm bearing down on them and tired of dealing with the enormous mutt the wife had adopted as a cute puppy, abandon their dog in the Badlands of North Dakota. In January.

The dog, a mongrel with apparent strains of Great Dane, German Shepherd, and just plain hound, is forced to fend for himself. Unfamiliar with the wild and drawn to humans, he soon begins killing sheep for food. As a brutal winter settles over the landscape, the dog's attacks on their flocks enrage the local shepherds. The situation intensifies as packs of wolves drift south from Canada, which has been hit even harder by the weather, and also begin killing sheep.


"Dwight would have made a good Indian fighter... or a good Indian," he said. "He's more at home with nature than any person I have ever known."
15-year-old Dwight Jerome, son of a sheepman, encounters the big dog early on, when he's still a pet traveling with his Eastern owners. Dwight doesn't forget him, and when a large dog begins killing sheep, he suspects who it is. Already the owner of a large dog - an Irish Wolfhound named Colleen - Dwight is drawn to the big mutt. The dog, he can tell from glimpses of him running wild and from the signs left behind, is the sort of smart, eager hunter he'd wanted when he bought Colleen. And when boy and dog encounter the big stray and a pair of wolves, the fight brings out the hunter in Colleen:


The wolfhound was bred for the show ring, but no one had to tell her what to do now. She had never hunted real wolves. She had never hunted with another dog, and she had never seen this big mutt before. Yet, instead of going to his side, she made straight for the wolves, counting on the big mutt to attack from his side. They worked as a team, instinct responding to instinct.


An old-school dog story, where the boy hero learns to be a man and the wild dog finds his master this is a well-written and fast-paced book with some modern attitudes about the stresses of humans sharing space with wild animals, but a decidedly non-modern attitude about wolves:


Now he knew it was wolves. Not coyotes, but those big Saskatchewan cruisers they used to have here in the old days, when his father was a boy - shrewd, smart, savage killers who could hunt alone or in pairs, or in whole family packs. No more vicious killer lived in nature.


The POV moves effortlessly from dog to boy to the young deputy sheriff who's trying track and kill the dog. Women are generally faceless - Dwight's little sisters, his mother, the pretty schoolteacher. The father - who has a personality, versus his mother - has a final comment on dogs, and the harsh winter:

When the history of this greatest of all storms is written, let no one forget the heroism of the sheep dogs of the West. We know what they've done for us, and we're just a small corner of the land covered by this storm. All over the range country dogs have died this way, cut up by wolves and coyotes and lions, frozen with their flocks, starved when they could have come in without their sheep.

About the Author
1910-1981
John Henry Reese was born in Nebraska and was primarily a writer of Westerns. He wrote a few other books for children, including Three Wild Ones (1963) about a rebellious teenager and a colt.

Links
Wikipedia on Reese

Other editions



Monday, July 19, 2010

Star - An Irish Wolfhound (1959)

Star - An Irish Wolfhound
Janet Rogers Howe
1959, The Westminster Press

"Remember 'way back last summer Pop promised me I could have a big dog if Dr. Bob should get a stray that isn't claimed or one somebody wants to find a home for. I don't care what kind it is as long as it's really huge"

Pete's humorless obsession is rewarded with an Irish Wolfhound through the usual auspices of children's book coincidence. Dr. Bob, the local vet, delivers an unwanted runt from a nearby kennel's prize litter, so choosy little Pete gets his wish for The Very Biggest Dog There Is. Unfortunately for the size-preoccupied boy, the kennel's owned by the mother of a disagreeable classmate, Chuck, who also ends up with a puppy from that litter. And his puppy, a male, is larger. Poor Pete!

... ten energetic young wolfhounds raced and wrestled together. One, a light honey-tan, was taller, longer and more mature-looking than the others. That was Gellert. Pete realized, with a real twinge of regret, that he was bigger than Star.

Pete and his best buddy, Bill, are annoyed by the arrogant and prickly Chuck, who wouldn't be their pal even if he didn't own a larger dog than Pete's. But Dr. Bob wisely sees that the problem is Chuck's overbearing mother, and encourages the boys to bond. Over their wolfhounds.

The writing is fine, the action smooth if not wonderful, and the overall quality is better than average. But there are just a few too many aggravating things. The yawningly familiar plot that a controlling mother is ruining her son, the insistence on reminding us at every turn that these are wolfhounds (she never calls them dogs), the female friend who gets backburnered consistently so that the effect is of an author trying to eliminate every female presence in the book - Pete's mother is dead, Bill's is never seen, Chuck's is an ogre, and Pete's aunt is a crank. The awkwardness of the author trying to have her hunter plot and eat it too by having a father quickly comment that a near-tragic shooting was a natural mistake on the part of a hunter. God forbid she criticize a hunter.


Other Books
Curly (1956)
Benjamin Big (1958, Saint Bernard dog)
The Mystery Of The Marmalade Cat (1969)
The Secret Of Castle Balou (1967)
Thunder And Jerry (1949, horse?)
Trinket (1961, Shetland pony)
Samuel Small's Secret Society (1960)

Sunday, May 9, 2010

Happy Mother's Day!

A collie with her litter, Album Of Dogs by Marguerite Henry, illustrations by Wesley Dennis.


The short story anthology Seven True Dog Stories by Margaret Davidson, cover by Susanne Suba.



A mutt mother proudly showing off her puppies, Album Of Dogs by Marguerite Henry, illustrations by Wesley Dennis.



A young Irish Setter honoring his mother's point in Marguerite Henry's Always Reddy (aka Shamrock Queen), illustrations by Wesley Dennis.

Sunday, April 25, 2010

Old Arthur (1972)

Old Arthur
Liesel Moak Skorpen, il. Wallace Tripp
1972, Harper & Row

It was Old Arthur's job to wait for William while William was at school. That old dog was very good at waiting. He had waited all his life.

An old farm dog, unwanted by his owner because he's too old to continue herding the cows and guarding the henhouse, finds a new home with a little boy.

Wagging that woolly tail was the most important job that that old dog did.

A sweet, old-fashioned story of an unwanted dog who faces harsh rejection only to find love with a little boy who, unusually, appreciates the very qualities that others disliked. The illustrations add punch to the story, and ably demonstrate how the love between boy and dog makes the old dog beautiful.


Other books by Liesel Moak Skorpen
All The Lassies
His Mother's Dog
We Were Tired of Living in a House
Outside My Window
Charles

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

The Visitor (1971)

The Visitor

Gene Smith, il. Ted Lewin

1971, Cowles Book Company


"Good-bye, little fellow," the man said. But he said it so softly that his wife and children could hardly hear him - let alone Sassafras, who was already inside the building.


Sassafras, a six-month-old Irish Setter, is left at a kennel while his family goes on a weeklong trip. But when a car accident kills his master during the trip, the widow decides the pup's return home will be too sharp a reminder to their children. She pays the kennel to keep him indefinitely, leaving the poor dog in eternal limbo. The gentle setter never fogets his beloved Home, but takes pity on the homesick dogs around him, comforting and protecting them.


An incredibly sad story, told from the point-of-view of Sassafras, who understands human speech enough to realize that his owner is dead, speaks with his fellow inmates and retains a memory so strong of his home and people that when he sees the kennel owner clean away old bones


Sassafras stopped chewing on his old bone because he did not want it taken away. It spoke to him of home. Instead he carefully put it to one side where he could always look at it.


A horrendously manipulative tear-jerker. And, horribly, based on a true story of an Irish Setter left at a boarding kennel for 13 years. The woman as a shallow monster who leaves the dog in limbo may have been completely true to life, but it stirs up ugly echoes of those old-school dog tales where men are the only gender truly fit for the loyalty and faith of a canine companion, because women are too concerned with clean floors.



Other books

The Hayburners

The Winner - juvenile horse novel (1970)


Nonfiction

When The Cheering Stopped (bio of Woodrow Wilson)

Still Quiet On The Western Front: Fifty Years Later

The Shattered Dream: Herbert Hoover In The Great Depression

Maximilian And Carlotta (bio)

Lee and Grant (bio)
High Crimes & Misdemeanors: The Impeachment of Andrew Johnson

American Gothic: The Story of America's Legendary Theatrical Family

The Dark Summer

The Police Gazette (ed., with Jayne Barry Smith)

The Champion (horse)

Thursday, March 11, 2010

Yankee Boy (1971)


Yankee Boy
Edmund O. Scholefield, il. Lewis W. Gordon
1971, The World Publishing Company

Ted wasn't exactly afraid of dogs, but neither was he exactly comfortable with them, either.

Ted Roche is a 14-year-old New Yorker when his widower dad remarries. Ted gets along fine with Loulou, a friendly artist who freelances for his dad's Madison Avenue advertising agency. But when her mother dies and Ted is taken to rural Alabama for her funeral, he enters a different world, one where he's unexpectedly stranded when his parents decide to leave him with his grandfather while they honeymoon.


Resentful and leery of the 'hillbillies' surrounding him, Ted quickly gets into one sticky situation after another with everyone from his grandfather to his new school's principal. His sole friend through this is the one he really didn't like at first, the pregnant hunting dog Sarah. And even as he begins to adjust to things, his reluctant fondness for Sarah - and then her puppies - remains. She has, after all, provided the catalyst for his changing view of his new environment.

The dog sat down beside him. Ted looked around him for a moment, and then, quite idly and without thinking about it, picked up a stick a foot and a half long, and then spun it through the air. Instantly, moving faster than he had ever seen her move before, Sarah took off in pursuit of the stick.

At some point in the 1960's, an older generation of children's writers attempted to adapt their style to a society that had changed enormously. In the earlier era, children were children up till about 18. They learned wise lessons from their elders; boys were physically punished if they misbehaved and not only accepted it but recognized it was just and right; girls realized that they could be bright and creative with their children when they married after college, and recognized that they had a duty to emotionally bolster all males that crossed their paths. In the later era, children became teens with Important Ideas and Thoughts to share; their elders learned from them, eventually. Both eras had some drawbacks, but at least books falling solidly on one side or the other had an internal consistency. Books like Yankee Boy straddle the line, uncomfortably.

There is a classic old-style plot of a boy learning to adapt to an unfamiliar place, learn humility, discover older values, and become a man. And then there is the window dressing of the later era - the mod clothes, the long hair, the kid's cool interior monologue. There are a couple of pointed shots at the culture wars raging around the late 1960s and early 1970s, namely the references to Ted's clothes and hair, the bits about black/white relations in the grandfather's household, and the total lack of reference to a certain military action. It's clear that Scholefield was old-school; his hip, urban teen is dragged out to the rural South to learn how to be a man, and leave behind the effete kid who doesn't like dogs and hates having his clothes mussed.

I grew up reading the old-school books, and I like them. But that style always had its ugly side - a smug, complacent attitude that what worked in 1842 will work today, that women and blacks and everyone else who isn't a white man with some money was better off back in the traditional world - and while you could just barely accept it as self-serving blindness in a book written in 1930 or 1950, there was no justification for one written in 1971. It was pure backlash, and pathetic.

Fun anachronisms: the reference to 'way out' clothes, which the author cagily never really describes, the father's crankiness about the son's long hair, the way the city boy's never heard of deer as a danger to cars, and, best of all, the reference to Beau Brummell.


Dogs
Sarah - 6-year-old black Lab, champion field hunter
Horace - Golden Retriever
Blackie - Lab
Yankee Boy - Lab

Links
Fantastic Fiction
Wikipedia on author
Beau Brummell at Wikipedia
Scout (the weird car the grandfather drives)

About the Author
1929-
Scholefield is a pseudonym for the author William E. Butterworth, who also used the pseudonyms Alex Baldwin, Webb Beech, Walter E. Blake, Jack Dugan, John Kevin Dugan, James W.E.B. McM Douglas, Allison Mitchell, Griffin, Eden Hughes, Blakely St. James, and Patrick J. Williams. As this implies, he wrote a lot of books, all under various names. His books for teens and children were under the name Scholefield.

Books as Scholefield
L'il Wildcat
Bryan's Dog
Maverick On The Mound
Tiger Rookie

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Scotty wins Westminster; crowd horrified at reminder that mutts exist

from The Morgan Dennis Dog Book by Morgan Dennis


A Scottish Terrier named Ch. Roundtown Mercedes Of Maryscot (aka Sadie) wins Best in Show at Westminster. PETA protestors sneak in and hold up signs saying "Mutts Rule" and Breeders Kill Shelter Dogs' Chances." I'm not a PETA fan, but they have a point. Not so much about the breeders, perhaps, but certainly about a) that mutts rule and b) the AKC does kill shelter dogs' chances - by refusing to crack down on puppy mills and high volume breeders, the AKC is helping create thousands of puppies who are prime candidates to end up in shelters.

Sadie's had a heck of a few months. She also won Best in Show at four clustered shows at the Kennel Club of Philadelphia in November, and at the Eukanuba National Championship Dog Show in California in December. Her breeder is Anstamm Scottish Terriers.


And some books featuring Scotties. And some other media too.

Picture books

Bios
First Dog Fala by Margare Suckley and Alice Dagliesh

Short stories
James Thurber's Jeannie stories, including Look Homeward Jeannie and In Defense Of Dogs, Even, After a Fashion, Jeannie. Which can be read online at Google Books.

Other Scotty stuff
Fala info at the National Park Service
Buy a Fala tile at the FDR Presidential Library and Museum
FDR Memorial with Fala
And, of course, the more recent Presidiential Scotties, Barney and Miss Beazley