When we moved to the roach-ridden house on Virginia Avenue in Bakersfield in January, 1961, we finally had ourselves a large fenced yard where we could have a dog. (See
Cisco, Lucy, and the Big Boxer Who Came To Our Marble Game... May 16, 2011)
Daddy brought home Dempsey, a big Boxer. We kids loved him. He would play "fetch" with the boys. He was a loving, happy dog for the most part. He didn't seem to mind staying in the yard, which was a good thing since Mama was still against having a dog in the house, even though the house was quite roomy, not crowded like the little house in Delano where we had "Lucy." Actually, Dempsey was a good looking dog; he could run like the wind and gracefully jump pretty high to catch things. I thought we were now a fairly normal family with a dog that would be our "Man's Best Friend" for a long time.
I was wrong. Dempsey seemed willing to be Daddy's best friend. He didn't see much of Mama except maybe when she was hanging out clothes, but he didn't bother her. He was a happy playmate with all of us kids. But...
When it came to the Mail Man, well that was another matter all together. Dempsey must have had a very bad experience with a Mail Man in his previous years, and he profiled any person in a U.S. Postal uniform whether or not driving a U.S. Postal vehicle. If a vehicle approached our mail box, which was on the other side of the fence, and stopped there, Dempsey would come charging out from wherever he was resting (or whatever he was doing) barking and growling viciously... It was enough to scare the daylights out of anyone.
I'm not sure, but I think the Post Office threatened to stop delivering our mail as their employees reported this huge, vicious, snarling-barking-growling dog boucing up and down just on the other side of the fence. They were afraid to take their eyes off him long enough to put the mail in the box. Apparently Dempsey sensed their fear and it riled him up even more.
So what to do? We didn't want to take our beautiful Boxer to the pound. We needed our mail. Sometimes there were checks in the mail, as Daddy received business mail there at the house where his mattress shop was out behind it. So Daddy came up with the solution of tying up Dempsey in the back yard until the mail had been delivered, usually about mid-day. Some times I think he stayed tied up back there even later unless the boys would loose him if they wanted to play with him after the mail man had gone away.
That seemed a solution for a few months. In September I went away to school in Cleveland, Tennessee. When I returned in the summer of 1962, my family had moved from the house/shop on Virginia Avenue in Bakersfield, to a small town a few miles away, Lamont.
I learned that Dempsey had a deep seated animosity not only for the Mail Man, but for Other Dogs as well. He had gotten into a fierce dog-fight with another dog who was outside the fence. In trying to get to the Enemy, Dempsey got hung on the fence. Sadly he died.
When I returned from Tennessee to my family in Lamont, my little sister, Diane, had a new dog, a little part-Dachsund who had an entirely different psychological hangup than Dempsey. His name was Cookie, and he fell in love with (and constantly tried to mate with) my big blue fuzzy house shoes.
These experiences with dogs in my youth are probably the reason that since then I haven't really been a dog lover...
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