A parade of dogs, many bassets, wove joy through the life of columnist and his family

In 1940, when I was 6 years old, my parents acquired three puppies named Witsie, Blitzi and Jeep.

They gave Blitzi to a neighbor kid. Why, I will never understand, but they gave darling Witsie to my older sister, June. So I bawled, howled and wailed. And it worked.

“All right,” June said with a sign. “I’ll take Jeep. You can have Witsie.”

Thus began my lifelong affiliation with dogs, which continues to this day in the person of Charley, paradoxically named not for me but for a previous Charley dog who showed up halfway down a lineage of canine hereditary succession.

Next came a collie pup I named Laddy after the movie star. He grew up to be magnificent. From a standing start, he could jump a 4-foot hog-wire fence. Although not officially a bird dog, he would thrash through brush ahead of us young hunters, all armed with shotguns our parents had given us when we turned 12.

After being spotted by Laddy, many a quail and many a cottontail rabbit came home for dinner.

“Go to August,” I would tell Laddy, as my dad smiled a welcome.

“Go to Cora,” I said, as mother enjoyed a canine kiss on her cheek.

Laddy knew family names and half of the names of those in the neighborhood.

In 1956, I graduated from college, got married, got drafted into the Army and shipped out to Heidelberg, Germany. That was a big year.

Returning in 1958 from overseas, my wife, Lenore, and I learned that dear Laddy had died of old age. We spent the first night back in my parents’ home gazing in dismay out the window at what appeared to be a big concrete cross in the backyard. Was this a gravestone to the departed Laddy?

No, no. Daylight revealed it as a mere bird bath. Whew. My mom and dad weren’t as nuts as we had thought.

Next came Sophie, offspring of a registered female basset hound prone to choose raffish friends as she roamed the streets around Kansas City’s Roanoke Park. Our Sophie emerged half German shepherd with long brown fur, and, thanks to the basset lineage, barely 16 inches tall.

By selecting various friends in her wanderings, Sophie’s mom had spawned not just one sort of crossbreed, but several in that same litter. We granted Sophie her heart’s desire, occasional freedom to wander those streets. She was hit by a car and suffered a broken pelvis. The vet said there was no way to splint the malady.

For three months she staggered around our apartment, pelvic bones grating against one another, her rear end shape-shifting like a creature from outer space. But she healed, lived long with us and met a magnificent pair of beagles named Shorty and Slats.

Those two were offspring of a mother killed by a car on an Ozarks gravel road. Charles Gusewelle, later to become a beloved columnist for the Kansas City Star (and write a book about pets titled “Quick as Shadows Passing”) found them there and nursed them into adulthood.

About 1964, we and our dogs had the good luck to land together as renters on a 40-acre Lenexa estate located not far from today’s Costco outlet there. Gus rented the cabin, Lenore and I the “carriage house,” while the owners occupied a mansion built in the 1920s of ponderosa pine logs.

Shorty and Slats — plus a Brittany spaniel Gus named Stubby, and our Sophie — all roamed a 2-acre fenced pasture, along with an aristocratic poodle and a streamlined Saluki hound, a breed that originated in Egypt and Arabia, swifter on the run than any greyhound. This was Poochy Paradise.

Owning only one dog, Sophie, we felt impoverished. We found a classified ad describing a mixed breed: half beagle, half basset. Sounded ideal, and for only $15. We had barely slapped our payment into the farmer’s hand before he tilted his head up and yodeled: “Charley! Cha-a-a-a-a-r-ley! Where is that damn dog?”

Damn dog? No, he was superb, and the duplication of names tickled my ego. Charley loved to run free through heavily forested but sparsely trafficked northern Shawnee, where we had, by 1965, built our new home. Once again — as we had with Sophie — we endangered our friend’s life by giving him freedom. He staggered home one afternoon, climbed stairs to the front porch and collapsed in a pool of blood.

I rushed him to a vet’s office, where he died. Some bigger dog, or a pack of coyotes, had mauled him beyond saving.

Quick as shadows passing, I think now, because our dogs, and Gusewelle’s — if their lives were not cut short —seemed at best to live 14 or 15 years, a typical hound life span. They’re shadows that pass through human lives not to be forgotten. Given how few years dogs are allowed, I wonder how, and why, I have deserved my 90 so far, plus whatever are yet scheduled.

And what about that Charley dog I mentioned earlier? After my wife died in 2017, after our final basset died, I first saw him at the Great Plains SPCA in Merriam. He was the perfect little hound, advertised as a 4-year-old beagle-basset mix, just like that grand little dog the farmer so long ago sold us for $15.

I gave him that revered old name, Charley and took him home. I often sleep with him now and awake in the night to scratch his ear. What a lot of pups, nearly all bassets, we have enjoyed down the years.

I even fondly remember Tanner, a basset owned by friends. I had one brief seated encounter with him at their home. They had just handed me a tall gin and tonic in a frosty glass when an exuberant 70-pound Tanner appeared suddenly at the door, so glad to see me that he leapt 5 feet across floor and rug to land in my lap.

I hardly spilled a drop.

Contact the columnist at hammerc12@gmail.com.

This story was originally published February 26, 2025 at 5:00 AM.