The Legendary Hoobert Heever



I'm not a dog snob. For the first 30 years of our marriage, we never had the money to buy an AKC dog, so a series of lovable mutts shared our lives. Probably the most memorable and clearly my favorite was a black-and-white, natural-born comedian named Hoo.

That's her above, laughing. Behind her is a our Golden Retriever, a pound puppy we named "Wuzzy." As a wee doggie, she looked like a little bear, so her name came from the nursery rhyme, "Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear.." She went by "Wuz" most of the time.

We got Hoo for free from a neighbor who owned her mother, a purebred German Shepherd. Her father was unknown. A half-shepherd sounded good, so we brought home the sweetest of 10 little pups.

How a dog gets its name at our house is usually left up to fate. In Hoo's case, it happened when another neighbor came over to see our new puppy.  "And this is who?" he asked politely, picking her up. In a light-bulb moment, I answered, "Yes, this is Hoo." Having one dog named Wuz and another named Hoo had potential for being very funny, I remember thinking.

Hoo didn't know who she was yet when she first came to live with us. As she grew, our hopes of owning a dog that looked like a German Shepherd began to fade. It wasn't long before her personality began to emerge as well. Hoobie was a nut. You could tell just by looking at her. She received her full name, Hoobert Heever Henderson, from something I read one day in a Reader's Digest. It was a short story about the first-ever live radio broadcast of a presidential address to the nation. It marked the end of the golden era for newspapers, which had long enjoyed a media monopoly as the sole source of news coverage.

President Herbert Hoover was standing by as the broadcast was about to begin. The announcer, incredibly nervous and daunted by his historic task, ceremoniously cleared his throat. In a high-pitched, quivering voice, he then effectively ended his broadcasting career by leaning to the mike and saying, "Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States, HOOBERT HEEVER."

I've always imagined this epic blunder having been followed by an audible gasp of horror from all the people in the radio station control room. I've also pondered the possibility that if hundred of thousands were listening to their radios at that moment, the announcer's huge faux pas may have caused a tsunami of collective gasps that rolled across America, eventually sending out a global "OMG!" Perhaps the massive intake of breath created an atmospheric change, a moment of shock so intense it was like a  "shot heard 'round the world."

But that's just speculation. The Reader's Digest article didn't say whatever happened to the poor guy. I hope he didn't go out and jump off a building. The country was in the Great Depression, after all.

Humiliation of this scale must have been hard to handle. Hopefully he found another job in a field where stage fright couldn't sabotage him. Perhaps he turned to Demon Rum and became a bum, like many men down on their luck in those days. 

Hoo knows? Yes, she does but she'd never tell. Hoo's tail must be continued, for she lived to be 16 years old and her legendary antics were many. Stay tuned, then. More Hoo is coming for you.

I Do Believe It's True

 

Someone told me
It's all happening at the zoo.
I do believe it,
I do believe it's true.

It's a light and tumble journey
From the East Side to the park;
Just a fine and fancy ramble
To the zoo.

You can take the crosstown bus
If it's raining or it's cold,
And the animals will love it
If you do.
[From: http://www.metrolyrics.com/at-the-zoo-p-simon-1967-lyrics-simon-and-garfunkel.html ]

It had been many years since I'd been to a zoo. My intense empathy and compassion for animals has always tainted my zoo visits in the past, so I quit going.

For my seven-year-old granddaughter's sake, however, I decided to go with her to the Portland Zoo recently.

I really disliked the bat cave, flat-out refused to go near the snake building, complained about paying $5 for a bottle of water, and got totally pooped out after a few hours.

I took these photos for you before heading back to the car to wait for the kids.

All in all, for me, it was a fairly fun trip to the zoo; I saw nothing that made me unbearably sad.

Like men incarcerated at San Quentin, the zoo animals appeared to suffer mostly from boredom and of course, lack of room to roam. Fat and lazy describes most of the creatures I saw. But, are they happy? Or are such feelings exclusive to humans?

The confined animals would be far worse off if they were free, I suppose. Life in the wild is dangerous and dinner times are far apart.

But, do you think they would chose to run or fly free -- even if it meant being sometimes hungry or afraid -- if they could?

I do. I do believe it's true.

Them Two Sure Was Good Ol' Gals

These two women, identified only as Minnie and Daisy, lived in Dixie, Idaho, around 1903. They were most likely "camp followers," as female opportunists were called who traveled to remote mining areas to seek their fortune.

Adventuresome girls, like merchants and many business entrepreneurs, made a lot of money supplying needs of prospectors like this odd-ball character at left.

Minnie and Daisy were cashing in on the last of the Old West gold rushes, the Thunder Mountain gold strike of 1898.
Located deep in Idaho's extremely remote and nearly inaccessible interior, the diggings nevertheless attracted thousands of men at the turn of the 19th Century.

Tiny Dixie remains today the last trace of civilization for travelers heading into the rugged back country. Beyond its few homes, cafe and store, the road ends and the going gets much tougher.

I've long been interested in the lives of women who came West a hundred or more years ago. I think I'd have preferred to cast my lot with the likes of Minnie and Daisy than to have been isolated with a no-fun husband on a homestead bearing children every-other year.

I probably would have balked about halfway through the trip if I'd allowed myself to be talked into going West on a wagon. I can imagine thinking, "This totally sucks;" getting madder and madder.

I can relate to an account of a fed-up woman who finally lost it on her way to the Oregon Territory in 1847. Sounds like a full-blown, pissed-off female snit fit:

"This morning one company moved on except one family. The woman got mad and would not budge nor let the children go. He had his cattle hitched on for three hours while coaxing her to go, but she would not stir. I told my husband the circumstances, and he and Adam Polk and Mr. Kimble went and took each one a young one and crammed them in the wagon and her husband drove off and left her sitting. She got up, took the back track and traveled out of sight, cut across, and overtook her husband.

"Meantime, he sent his boy back to camp after a horse that he had left and when she come up to her husband, he says, "Did you meet John?" "Yes," was the reply, "and I picked up a stone and knocked out his brains." Her husband then went back to ascertain the truth, and while he was gone, she set one of their wagons on fire, which was loaded with their goods. The cover burnt off and some valuable articles were lost. He saw flames and came running, and put it out, and then he mustered spunk enough to give her a good flogging." ("Women's Diaries of the Westward Journey," by Lillian Schlissel, copyright 1982, Schocken Books, New York.) http://www.amazon.com/Diaries-Westward-Journey-Lillian-Schlissel/dp/0805211764/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1283631296&sr=1-1

As a veteran of many heated discussions with my late husband in our nearly 40 years, I think this woman had decided she was done with this marriage. She had to have known when she'd crossed the line where her husband was sure to become enraged. (I think it was probably when she lit the wagon on fire, don't you?)

I knew where that line was in my marriage and trust me, I always backed off of it. Every relationship has its loaded emotional nuclear warheads that, once fired, pretty much signal the end of the partnership.

I've always wondered what happened to this couple but of course there's no way of knowing. Maybe when she finally got out West, the woman dumped her old man and ran off to San Francisco.

That's what I'd have done, especially after being "flogged." Figuring anything would be better than that, I'd have hooked up with some good old girls like Minnie and Daisy, made a bunch of money and perhaps even had a few good times along the way.

Maybe that's because I've come to realize the enormous value in having at least one really good girlfriend in my life. The support and companionship of your own gender is priceless.

We all need to vent to someone we can trust sometimes. It keeps us from torching the wagons.

How I Passed A Cardiac Stress Test

Here's a photo of what's left of my big, pretty Dodge Ram after my son nearly had a head-on collision with a motor home.

This happened while he was taking my granddaughter home to her mother's. Yes, OMG, he had Anna with him.

No one was hurt in the wreck. That's the good part.

My late husband and I bought this truck brand new five years ago and I had just finished paying it off. Now it's totaled. Ironic, yes?

I found this recent near-tragedy quite emotionally troubling, having lost my husband in a motorcycle crash just last year. You know it's bad when you have to remind yourself, "Just breathe."

The often-heard phrase from friends, "It could have been much worse," meant to comfort me, is the very idea that makes me weak in the knees to contemplate.

Thank God no one was hurt. Absolutely grateful for that, I am, indeed.

I'm also relieved I didn't have a stroke or heart attack when I found out about it. I did have a giant panic attack of sorts when my son called to say, in trembling voice, "Mom, I've been in a wreck." Hearing that totally freaked me out so bad I very nearly fainted, which freaked me out even further. Panic attacks feed on themselves, have you ever noticed?

I've seen people in the movies faint upon receiving bad news but had never really experienced that extreme-shock reaction in real life. It's like your brain just goes, "Nope. I am not hearing this, I am definitely not dealing with this, and I am out of here, right now." It's a weird sensation. It felt like my heart stopped, but of course, it didn't.

I have advised my son, should such an unfortunate incident ever happen again, to please begin such phone conversations by saying, "Mom, we're alright, but ..."

So now I am looking to buy another vehicle, which is one more thing I've never done without my husband. Sometimes I wish so badly that I could just call him up and have him tell me what to do.

That ain't happenin', though, so I'll just have to wing it once again and delve bravely into the strange world of "man stuff."

Last year at about this time I was pondering getting in my firewood supply for the winter, which had always been another one of my husband's domain. Followup: Red fir is my choice as No. 1, followed by Tamarack. A blend of the two makes a nice mix in my particular stove. No more Birch for me, however; burns too hot and causes creosote in the stove pipe. The darn bark is unruly, too.

Live and learn. Roll with the punches. Such are the cliches I live by these days.

Could an angel on a Harley have been there to intervene? Well, actually, I thought that was fairly obvious. Of course he was.