English Bulldog, Spring 1941 – 1952
On Easter weekend 1941 while we were living in Charleston, WV, Mother & daddy planned a big visit with Mother’s sister Gladys and her family (husband Earl (EJ) and son Freddy (my closest cousin) in Pittsburgh. The day we were to leave I came home from school tired and with a fever. Mother and daddy decided to make the 6 hour drive there anyway, letting me sleep in the back seat and we spent the weekend with the family. Freddy and I played and played Saturday afternoon and that night went to the local neighborhood movie theater to see The Philadelphia Story, Freddy grumbling afterwards about “all that love stuff”. After lunch on Sunday, Mother and Gladys hugging and crying because they had to be separated, we drove home.
I went back to school on Monday, and when I came home for lunch, mother noticed the spots on my face…I had the measles. I was shut up in my room, blinds closed, for two weeks. One afternoon during the second week, Mother and dad came to my room and had a surprise for me. They put Pug, an 8 week old English Bulldog puppy, in my lap. I loved on her for a while until she got off of my lap and walked around on my bed. It took us a while before we realized that she was peeing all that time. So back outside she went, to her pen in the back yard.
Lady Pintno
Our next door neighbor and landlord got a line on a litter of puppies and dad went with him to look at the puppies. They were purebred AKC English Bulldogs. Mr. Casto, our neighbor, purchased Chang for $25. Chang was so expensive because she had good confirmation with a tan body and a black face. Pug on the other hand had a white face that melded into a pink nose, she was considered “imperfect” and was only $10. (What a contrast to purebred bulldogs prices 70 years later when bulldogs cost at least $1,000 and up to $25,000.) So sisters Pug and Chang were going to be neighbors.
The dogs stayed in the back yard and one day a little boy came by and looked at them and said “That one has a Bwakno” (for black nose), and “that one has a Pintno” (for Pink nose)! So we registered her name as Lady Pintno. The biggest irony is that as Pug grew up, the older she got, the blacker her nose became. By a year later her nose was totally black.
Vermin
In September 1942, we moved into 109 1/2 Maryland Ave. We were unpacking and decided to go out for dinner and when we came home and turned on the lights, the kitchen floor, including an open Wheaties box, was solid with black bugs (roaches). It took us a long time to clean up the vermin including rats that lived under the shed along our back yard property line. Pug would sit on our back porch and watch the rats come out. She was lightning fast and would chase them and try to catch them. When she caught one, she would shake it to death. We were so proud of her. Then a rat bit her and after that she somehow never managed to catch one again.
Pug was as much my mother’s dog as she was mine because after high school, I went to college and there was no room for a dog in my life. I was away at college when all of the dogs in the neighborhood had gotten poisoned and only Pug and one other dog lived. Finally, Pug got poisoned too. And we knew who the culprit was. Pug lived to be 12.
When I got to Skidmore, I hankered for another bulldog and I got Candy.