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A Columbia County Boy's Recollections and Memories of Columbia County Florida (2012) Lenvil H. Dicks

A DOG BECOMES A FAMILY MEMBER

The last year that I was band director at Union High School in Lake Butler, the pastor of the First
Baptist Church had four children in the band, and their names were Paul, Ellen, Maizie, and Betty, and
their last name was Young. Put those initials together and you get PEMBY, and those four kids gave
Ruth and me a puppy which they had already named Pemby.

That puppy was a cross between a Fox Terrier and Boston Bull, and it did not take long for the name
Pemby to simply become “Pimpy”. I guess folks thought that we had picked this strange name for our
dog, but that little dog was the smartest animal I have ever been around. My former band director, Mr.
Carl Roberts, when he would come over to the house to play trumpet duets with me, often said that the
dog should have been a show dog, because she was the smartest dog that he had ever seen, too.

That little dog understood over 50, and perhaps 75 words of the English language, and would very
willingly and happily do anything you told her to do. When she was about 6 weeks old, and Ruth and I
mentioned the word cookie, she would be all over us expecting to be granted a cookie to eat, which she
loved. We decided that if we wanted to refer to a cookie, we would have to spell it, and that is what we
did for about a week, just spelling c-o-o-k-i-e, but it was not a week until the dog had learned the
spelling meant cookie, and she would jump all over us trying to get a cookie, even when we had to spell
the name.

I taught her every trick I had ever seen any dog do, such as lie down, roll over, stand up, stand on your
head jump up in the chair, and anything else that I could think of to tell her to do it did not take but two
or three repetitions of that command for her to have that act mastered. I could place her down, say
“stay”, and she would not move from that spot no matter how long I was gone, because i once forgot I
had told her to stay and did not come back for about 30 or 40 minutes, and she was still sitting right
where I told her to stay. I cannot fault people that 1 know today who have a pet, and consider the pet to
be a family member, because Pimpy was every bit of a family member to Ruth and me, and I am still
amazed at how smart that little dog was.

When she was about 5 or 6 years old, she developed some sort of ailment which resulted in her walking
toward a wall, and when she got to the wall, she did not realize there was anything in her way and she
would just continue to walk in place in the same spot until we moved her, and that was the only thing
that we could find wrong with her. She just seemed to come up against an obstacle and not realize the
obstacle was there. This got worse and worse, and she began to fail in other ways, and we took her to a
vet, who had a name for the disease she had that was some kind of a brain deterioration, and he
recommended that we have her euthanized.

That is what we did, and it is one of the hardest things I can ever remember having to do. Although I
was over 30 years old by the time we had to put her away, I will confess, and this will come as a surprise
to some who know me, that I cried like a baby.

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