I grew up with Basset Hounds. Sweet stinky clowns. Needed baths, practically daily! Jackie Cooper, a former child actor, starred in a black and white 1950s sitcom called The Peoples’ Choice. It featured his pet Cleo, a talking basset hound, who commented on the goings on. Every time a popular show has a purebred pet their popularity explodes. So, we got Triste Sac (sad sack in French). Sad Sack was a WWII GI character. They do look sad with their droopy features! My mother would clip his ears above his head with a wooden clothespin to keep them clean. One less Basset Hound cleaning chore. I do not remember why when I went to Florida State, in January 1971, he came with me. I already had my stray Lady, who we figured was a red bone hound. And Daisy, the dumbest Basset Hound in history, found her way into my brood. She may have inspired this post. You will see why at the end 😊.
Some of you may know by now the importance the scholar Lewis Mumford had on my life. Van Wyck Brooks, a professor of poetry at Yale, founded the American Mercury. An important goal was rediscovering the intellectual and literary history we had in the United States. Damn those Anglophiles and Francophiles Hemingway and Fitzgerald! Mumford was in England editing the journal of the Fabian Socialist Society. Brooks recruited him back to the states. Mumford wrote a critical literary biography titled, “Herman Melville”. When I finally met him face to face in Boston after three years of correspondence, I said,
“You do know that millions of American high school students have cursed you without knowing who you are for dooming them to read Moby Dick”
He just smiled.
So why share all that? I had found a first edition in a used bookstore. That damned Basset Hound Daisy pulled that ONE book off the shelf and ate the cover off of it! Slight reduction in value, that! My friend William W. Whalen (if I have not already, I will write about him) was an archivist at Harvard. He had their restoration department rebind and re-cover it for me!
About Mumford. People have asked why I didn’t have him autograph my collection of his works when we met in Boston? I have the best autographs of all: his letters to me written in his own hand. He edited a collection of the Israeli Urban Planner Artur Glikson’s works published in the Hague and sent me an inscribed copy in 1973.
Triste used to chase the female dogs on Landis Green. He was quite up in years by then, so without much success. I told my vet Jerry Deloney, founder of the Northwood Animal Hospital here in Tallahassee about it. He said he had a way we could help him in his old age! He gave him a shot of testosterone. Oh, brother, did that work. More about that later.
In the summer of 1972, I worked for Calvin Jones digging up Spanish missions in North Florida. We stayed in tents out in the woods. One of them would be restored for the Bicentennial in 1976. Then the 1973 and 1974 oil crisis blew that budget! We covered them up again.
There were a lot of mosquitos in the summer then. One night I got one of those green citron laced spirals that burned with a glowing end. It was supposed to repel them. It sat on a little metal stand on the floor on my tent. I wake up hacking from smoke. Lady, Daisy, or the old boy had knocked it over. I get Lady and Daisy out of the tent easily. Triste growled at me!
He got dowsed with the bucket of water I used to put out the fire.
Triste also earned Calvin’s ire! If you have ever seen an archeological dig, the damn things have perfectly vertical smooth sides and are geometrically perfect rectangular holes! Talk about OCD! We called them trenches. One day when we went back to camp, Triste was down in the dig asleep.
“Phil, let him be!” said Calvin.
When we got back, Triste had reached up and pulled down a 3 foot stretch of wall to make himself a nice soft cool pile of dirt to sleep on. We found him draped over it. Sound asleep. Calvin Jones:
“The dog stays back in camp from now on!”
More driving as fast as I could to outrun them (the explanation of this is next!)
Another funny dogginess I dealt with in college was trying to get to school without them. I lived way out on a dirt road called Autumn Lane off Springhill Road in Tallahassee. It was maybe a mile long; I was in a house trailer at the end on a cypress swamp. It was a perfect place for my three mutts to spend their free time while I was in class.
Except when I left for class. In those days I drove a yellow and white Packard. If I could not get them chasing a swamp critter, then they chased Gertrude, my car (seethe post on when I was a Santa Claus for how it got that name). I would drive like hell leaving a sandstorm in my wake. I’d wait at the stop sign on Springhill road for the dust to settle. As often as not there they would be running as hard as they could to try to catch up with me! Into the car, back to the trailer, do it all over again. I had to leave for school EARLY every day to deal with them!
Now back to Daisy. I lived in a house on Mahan drive near Magnolia. The railroad tracks at that point were at least two stories high. Like so much in the south, it was covered in Kudzu Vines. One day Daisy disappeared. When we called her, she replied with that beautifully deep Basset Hound howl. We had quite a crew looking for her. I am down on the railroad tracks. I was sure I heard her above me. I pulled myself up the hill using the vines as hand holds. She had fallen off the cliff and was hanging suspended in the vines, under her legs and belly.
