Our Dog Waldo and the Great Bidding War of 1975
Joseph Rupp, Sugar High Motivation
Waldo nursed a bad habit. He wore the telltale signs all around the contours of his beard, grey kitty litter pebbles glue stuck to his perpetually moistened two-tone fur. We kept the box in the laundry room. We would often see Waldo slinking, head down, out of the room, smacking his mouth like he had peanut butter attached to the roof. It wasn’t. Once discovered, you could hear my mother intone, from across the small house, incredulous and with a hint of resigned humor, “WALL-doh”
My parents loved animals. My mother really loved stray animals. We once temporarily housed sixteen cats within the confines of our Canoga Park home when two female adults had litters simultaneously. My father joked that life in my mother’s dotage would include a menagerie of felines dotted around a tiny one room apartment like monkeys running free in the jungle.
Overtime, we also sported three dogs, two finches, a floppy eared bunny and assorted fish, not to mention the frog we let loose in the backyard one year. The frog had emigrated from Thousand Oaks after my grandmother and I went on a tadpole gathering mission one summer near her home. My parents got sole custody of the science experiment as the tadpole grew to frog hood in our kitchen.
We let froggy loose near a beautiful beached log my parents had brought from Santa Barbara and decorated the backyard near our groovy ‘70’s style redwood hot tub. My father went out of his way to bring the nearly six-foot driftwood home as a surprise for my mother who grew attached to the lumber after one summer vacation on the beach. Froggy called it home for as long as we imagined he lived there.
Waldo arrived a great story. My parents had been on the hunt for a Sheltie, short for Shetland Sheepdog, and had been optimistically scouring animal shelters in the Valley, looking for one. These dogs look like miniature versions of Lassie of TV fame. So said my parents. Once we understood that, we wanted our own. Amazingly, perhaps a little too amazingly, the West Valley Animal shelter was in possession of just such a wonder.
When my parents originally inquired about breaking the dog out of the shelter, they discovered the rules. If not claimed in fourteen days, the dog would be available for purchase, plus a small fee for neutering. If more than one person wanted him, the dog would be awarded to the highest bidder.
My dad arrived on the appointed day before work at 8:25 in the morning. In the small linoleum lined confines of the shelter, my father discovered he had competition. Another lady had arrived. A well-dressed professional, my father sensed her nervousness. She continuously glanced at her watch and then would look up and around the room as if late for an appointment.
Meanwhile, my father stoically resigned himself to the potential bidding war outcome. He thought, why be worried about the dog? If it’s our place to win the bid, great.
But, let's be serious, he really wanted the dog. My parents had already named him, Waldo. Not a good place to be emotionally in a bidding war. So much for stoicism.
At 8:30, an official from the clinic, clad head to toe in jungle cruise beige, arrived to spell out the rules and start the bidding process. He looked at both my father and the competition and said, “All right, the bidding will start at 9…”
The lady huffed deeply, said under breath, but loud enough for everyone to hear, “I cannot wait that long…I have to get to work!” and rushed out of the room. She thought the bidding started at 9 o’clock that morning, a half hour later. We had won Waldo not because of a clever bidding strategy, but the fog of war.
The animal clinic official looked at my dad and said, “That’ll be nine dollars and one cent, plus neutering fee. The dog is yours.” And with that Waldo joined the family.
You might be shocked, but it turned out, that as cute and “Sheltie like” as Waldo appeared as a puppy, he turned out to look more like a cartoon version of a terrier crossed with a giant fluffy throw pillow. He looked nothing like a Sheltie, except for the combination of colors, which resembled the puppy in the picture at the top of this post.
We loved the dog with all our might. He joined the other menagerie and spent many a day hunting extra nutrition in the laundry room. Aside from his daily kitty litter raids, he became the perfect companion to our designer dog, Robespierre, aka Robie. Robie was a cross between a caramel colored Yorkshire Terrier and a black poodle. At the time, that meant the dog qualified as a mutt and did not command top dollar.
Of course, today, such a combination means you have a high-priced designer dog with papers to prove it. Apparently, my parents were ahead of their time!
Next Up: How a paper route saved Waldo’s place in our family.
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