When I was about two years old and we lived on Mirror Lake over Grover Cleveland’s photo shop, we had a beautiful and big Gordon Setter/Chesapeake Bay Retriever that my father had won in a poker game. My parents named her “Gin,” most likely after the bathtub variety that we produced locally. I called her “Gin Dog” and she was my keeper, often meeting me at the Lake Placid Post Office to walk me safely home from school when I was in kindergarten. I was devastated when we eventually left the apartment and my dog was moved to the Tyrell family farm on Station Street, where the dog was critically wounded by one of the itinerant farm hands. My parents were leaving the village to live at the Lake Placid Golf and Country Club. There my father, Len, would be professional for the next 15 years and my mother would run the food and banquet concessions. They could not take our dog with them.

    When my mother and father later moved into the woods, first into Lambs Camp on Echo Pond and later to Timberdoodle, on the Whitney Road, there was a succession of other dogs that lived with them. There were two Beagles, one named Susie and the other Bingo. There were also several “Walker” hunting hounds that were kept in outside kennels. They kept up a steady howling at night at a red fox, who delighted in running by the kennels and teasing them. Around 1940, Helen Anson and I borrowed one of these hounds (who was named Oscar) to use him to win  first prize with us at an Olympic Arena summer costume party where we appeared as Mickey and Minnie Mouse and Pluto.

    When I was in high school, my mother had, at Timberdoodle, a black cocker spaniel she called “Pretty.” This dog loved to go fishing and sit in the boat when she went trolling for trout on Lake Placid Lake or Connery Pond. My grandparents at the Goodsell Cottage owned “Queenie,”  a yellow cocker spaniel who was a sister to “Pretty.” My grandmother fed the dog better than she did my grandfather, but she gave them both the same vitamins. There was never a dog in my life again, until we lived in Denver in the 1970s.

    In October of 1975, after our move to Denver the previous March, I and my two children still left at home sneaked a dog into the house by presenting a 6- week-old black lab puppy to my husband Charlie for his birthday on October 10th. We celebrated their birthdays together for the next 17 years. At that time, he grumbled a lot about our not consulting him about this gift, but he secretly loved having this dog in his life. My son Doug named her Sheba, but she earned her pet name of “Dumb Dog”  before she was a year old. I have never come across a more guilty canine. When Sheba had done something bad, we would find her in the family room, her head under the raised hearth of the fireplace, (the space used for firewood), with her bottom sticking out the back, tail wagging hopefully. Our response was always, “Dumb Dog” what did you do now?   

    One time, we discovered Sheba had stolen all the just-baked pieces of a gingerbread house that we had cooling on three trays on the dining room table. Not only that, but she had hidden the trays under the table, The same thing happened to two frozen ducks we had left in the kitchen sink One duck she apparently ate, bones and all, and the second one she buried for future use in the yard. Our yard had a high fence that no dog should be able to get over, but this “Dumb Dog” figured it out. She excelled Houdini as an escape artist, and some Friday nights when she turned up missing, and didn’t show up again until after midnight, we were informed that she had been attending the football games at nearby Cherry Creek High School where she sat with the pompom girls. Once Sheba had been at the vets for a three-day stay-over, after slicing open her foot river rafting. The day after she got home, Sheba escaped out of the yard and a call came from the nearby dog hospital saying that she was back visiting at the pet hospital. That was a really “Dumb Dog.” In her 16th year she developed a form of dog Alzheimer’s disease and would spend all day going in and out of her “doggie” door, because when she went out she forgot why, and when she came in she forgot she had gone out. She was seventeen when Charlie retired and we prepared to come back to Lake Placid to live. She was then in bad shape, and we knew that we could not take her with us. Charlie was the bravest one of us, and also the saddest, as he  took our “Dumb Dog” to be put to sleep.

    Since returning to Lake Placid, I have had no pet until this past November, when I inherited an eight-year-old cat from a neighbor family who could not take the pet with them on a move to Florida. The famous Russian ice skaters, the Protopopovs, who live five months of the year in my basement apartment, told me about the plight of this kitty and convinced me that we should offer her a home. The cat came into my residence just when Oleg Protopopov suffered a stroke and the kitty, “Lady Jane,”  played a big part in his speedy recovery. When in December Oleg and Ludmila left for their home in Switzerland, the cat moved upstairs with me. I finally have bonded with a cat and now understand what cat lovers admire in felines. Lady Jane and I spend a lot of time sitting together and stroking each other. She is smart enough to have caught on to my rules of cat behavior and tries her best to please me. This kitty is horrified at the thought of not making it to her litter box in the basement. One day she careened off her favorite couch spot and raced toward the stairs, where she tripped, then flipped and did a double axle before again landing on the stairs and completing her mission toward the litter box. (I knew just how she felt.)

    It is said that “dogs have masters, but cats have staff.”