THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, December 10, 1994 TAG: 9412100262
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Guy Friddell
LENGTH: Medium: 59 lines
In boyhood, my dog was an Irish Scotch wire-haired fox terrier named Tony for cowboy Tom Mix's horse. Without papers, he had traces of exotic ancestry.
My mother, when she brought Tony from a pet shop as a mere white puff of a pup looking like a fuzzy white dandelion head that might blow away with the wind, pronounced him an Eskimo spitz. One had enlivened her childhood.
The pet shop had made no such claim. But placing Tony in my cupped hands, she said: ``The minute I LAID EYES on that dog I KNEW it was an Eskimo SPITZ!''
Maturing, he had a Scottie's stocky build, fox terrier's smooth white coat, and goatee of Irish wire-haired origin. ``Honey, it would take a pile of money to produce such a strain,'' she told me.
With wispy goatee, he looked like a Southern colonel, as, on occasion, my mother addressed him.
```Where's the Colonel?'' she asked one evening amid visitors. Then, without explaining, she went to the kitchen and began beating a carving knife on a wood block.
Tony, thinking she was pounding round steak for supper, came barrelling to the back door for scraps. Only then did the company comprehend the Colonel was canine.
An imperious one. Demanding water, he'd knock around his empty tin dish with a forepaw to call us.
When mother held out his bowl of food, she'd extend a foot and he'd jump over it. As supper time neared, he began barking and bounding about kangaroolike and she hobbling with right foot out-thrust, cried ``QUIET, SIR!'' each exciting the other in an antic kitchen scene.
Finding a dirty crust, he'd take it in his jaws and, looking around to make sure no other dog was about, bury it in the nearby cinder road.
Each day, sighting me a block away returning from school, he crouched, head lowered, and, lifting each foot slowly, eyes fixed on mine, stalked me.
I, dropping books, got on hands and knees and, returning his fixed gaze, crept toward him. A pace away, he charged roaring into my arms. Neighbors, peering from windows, shook their heads.
His foe was a bulldog who, at Tony's challenging bark, would rush along a 100-foot run and fling himself up an eight-foot cement embankment to within two feet of Tony, then fall to the ground; at which, cocky Tony swaggered off.
A six-foot fence rimmed the length of run. It didn't occur to the bulldog, who bore a striking resemblance to Winston Churchill, to climb the fence; but one day, dropping from the embankment, he fell over the fence to freedom.
And, arising, came trundling up the steep slope after Tony, who bolted a half block until the bulldog caught him. Tony fell on his back with his four feet upthrust. The bulldog, rumbling, lowered his fierce head to Tony's face and gave him a slobbery kiss.
Of all Tony's exploits, my mother said, ``It's the spitz in him.'' by CNB