Column: A Story For Father’s Day

by Woody

A Father, A Son And A Promise Kept

The boy, seven years old, was in the family barn doing chores. This was a full eight decades ago, yet the boy – my dad – remembers it like last week.

“I was cornered by rats,” Pop shares. “Big ones. Lots of ’em. To this day, I have a real phobia.”

The frightening memory of a Midwestern rat pack surging out of the hay is, surprisingly, also a cherished one because Pop’s boyhood dog, a terrier mix named Queenie, came running.

Pop, right, with grandson Greg and me.

Pop, right, with grandson Greg and me.

She did what terriers instinctively do: caught each rat in her teeth and gave it a side-to-side neck-breaking shake, tossed it aside like a rag doll, and then went after the next one and the next and the next. Lassie rescuing Timmy.

“She may not have saved my life,” Pop continues, “but at the time it sure felt like it.”

If Queenie did not literally save Pop’s life that day, it is still fair to say she was roundabout responsible for saving many other lives – hundreds, if not thousands – in the future. I will explain.

Queenie’s defining moment actually did not happen in the barn that afternoon; it occurred on a Sunday evening the following summer. The boy, now almost nine, noticed his dog was sick. Soon she went into seizure.

Unbeknownst at the moment, a deranged man had laced raw meat with strychnine – rat poison – and fed it to more than two-dozen dogs throughout the small rural Ohio neighborhood.

What the boy did know was he needed his father’s help, and urgently. Unfortunately, this was eons before cell phones so he could not reach his dad, a country doctor who was out making weekend house calls.

It would have been no problem had the boy known what patient his dad was visiting. Back then the boy did not even need to dial local phone numbers – he would just pick up the telephone and tell the woman operator (it was always a pleasant woman) the name of any person in town and she would connect them simple as that, the operator all the while chatting with the boy until the other person answered.

Tearfully, helplessly, anxiously the boy watched out the front window at 210 Henry Street for his dad to get home.

“I was so scared for Queenie,” that boy, now 87, recalls.

At long last the boy’s dad – my Grandpa Ansel – came home. It proved to be a life-changing “house call.” Ansel put down his well-worn black leather doctor’s bag and checked out his critical “patient.”

Immediately he suspected poisoning and took out a bottle of ether he kept in his medical bag for emergencies such as putting a patient to sleep before setting a broken bone.

Humming softly, Ansel gently held an ether-soaked cloth over Queenie’s snout in the same gentle, caring fashion he used to calm a frightened child crying in pain until the anesthesia took its hold.

The ether-induced unconsciousness temporarily stopped Queenie’s potentially deadly seizures, but when the potion wore off the fierce convulsions would return. It was imperative to keep the dog asleep until the poison could hopefully run its course; however, a continuous does of ether would itself prove fatal.

Hence, Ansel had to constantly monitor the dog’s breathing and administer a brief whiff of ether when necessary. By doing so he was able to keep Queenie precariously balanced on a high wire between slumber and seizures.

Throughout the long night, Ansel kept vigil by the ill dog’s side while the boy kept vigil by his country-doctor-turned-veterinarian father’s side. Soon, Ansel had two sleeping heads on his lap, albeit only one required ether’s aid.

“The next day Queenie was better,” Pop shares, his voice filled with marvel and gratitude all these years later. “She was the only one of all the poisoned dogs to live. The only one. All because of my dad.”

And here is the most important thing. Pop adds: “That dog, that night, changed my life. Right then I promised myself I was going to become a doctor, just like my dad.”

Happy Father’s Day to that boy who kept his promise.

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Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com.

Check out my new memoir WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece”