Family Farm Pets - Dave’s Midwestern Ohio Memories

A Series of Guest Blogs by an out-of-state Fish Report reader originally from this area about fond memories of growing up in Midwestern Ohio during the 50’s & 60’s.


Family Farm Pets

While growing up on the farm, our family always had a dog as a pet, along with some un-named stray cats that dad like to keep around to control the rodents. Plus occasionally a farm animal was adopted, usually a baby chick or a new-born calf that my sisters would name but never seemed to care for; that was my job!. But for me, the family dogs were special. They were typically mutts and only once do I recall having talked my parents into getting a pure bred, a collie, which of course we named Lassie. The day or so after we picked her up at the dog pound in Sidney, she nipped at my sister so was immediately returned (the dog, not the sister!). Lassie could fetch a ball or a stick, could do tricks and respond to verbal commands, unlike my sister. So I was really peeved to say the least.

In addition to Lassie, we had dogs named Brownie (that’s me petting him in the above 1958 photo with my siblings), Skippy, Cookie, Spot, Ginger, etc. The family dogs freely roamed the farm and sometime just disappeared for days and a couple just disappeared, period. We were heartbroken for a while until the next mutt was picked up from the pound or a litter from a neighbors dog. We smothered the new arrival with unconditional love and soon forget all about the “dog gone”. For some reason they all seemed to enjoy chasing any car coming down our long gravel lane, which usually meant their eventual demise and another replacement would be needed soon enough. One situation I’ll never forget happened as I was riding my bike along a country road with our dog Cookie running ahead. There was a curve in the road before it intersected with a state highway. While riding around the curve, I heard the roar of a speeding car, then a bone-chilling thump, followed by some screeching tires. When I got to the intersection, there was the driver, a high school hot rodder from town, throwing Cookie’s body into the culvert, then taking off in his car. I was in too much shock to say anything, but never forgave the guy.

I recall several songs during that era about dogs such as Hound Dog by Elvis or How Much is the Doggie in the Window sung by Patti Page. Speaking of hound dogs, my uncle, who lived on the farm next door, was an avid coon hunter, so he always had hound dogs around his place that we’d love to tease cause they were chained up and couldn’t chase us down. And at night, before falling asleep, I could hear his hound dogs howling at the moon or at a newly treed coon in the woods nearby. My uncle loved coon hunting and would have hundreds of coonskins in his shed that he’d sell each spring. Once he made me a coon skin cap, so I loved being Davy Crocket when we played cowboys and Indians; that is until the coonskin cap started to stink, at which time mom asked me to bury it in the corn field!