Mike Dillingham: Alaska Dogs and Iditarod Mushers: The Adventures of Balto, Back of the Pack, Honor Bound, Rivers

He didn’t have much response to Clara Horton, a glamorous movie star, either, when she placed a collar of white roses around his thickly furred neck.

As for Kaasen, when Miss Horton kissed him, he blushed deeply, saying, “I was never treated like this before.”

But everything was unfamiliar, strange. Kaasen and the dogs experienced culture shock, a feeling of confusion and anxiety that can set in when a person — or dog — is first exposed to a culture or environment very different from his or her own. With its large population — almost 700 times the size of Nome’s — movie culture and dry, warm weather, Los Angeles was a double-whammy: It turned their world upside down, like a roller coaster ride on an alien planet.

“It all seems strange here,” Kaasen quietly told a reporter in an interview in his suite at the luxurious Biltmore Hotel. “The crowds, the buildings, the traffic — and the climate, it is so different. It’s strange to Balto, too, and the other dogs. We must go back north soon.”

Dressed in a loose-fitting — and unfashionable — plain black suit, Kaasen looked out of place in the lavish surroundings. Standing by a tall, richly draped window, he looked down fearfully at the busy street eight stories below. “I won’t dare to cross the street alone for several days,” he mused. “With all those automobiles and streetcars, it is a wonder you don’t kill more people than you do. Alaska is safer than this country.”

And where was Kaasen’s pal Balto? Lesser had put him up in a fancy room at the Biltmore, too! The other dogs were staying in swank kennels on Lesser’s Hollywood movie lot, waiting to complete, Balto’s Race to Nome .

The movie took two more weeks to finish. One day during a break, the dogs were trucked to Third Street Elementary School, where Lesser’s son, Bud, 9, and sister, Marjorie, 7, were students.

“It was a nice day — not raining,” Bud would recall many years later, when he was in his eighties. “The school went outside to see Balto — about 200 kids. I was so jealous of those dogs getting all the attention — and here I was, lost in the crowd! But walking back to class, I was the hero. Everyone knew the dogs were there because of my father.”

The dogs loved being petted by so many pairs of loving, little hands, and Kaasen was gaining confidence in his new environment. But deep down, the whole team felt deeply unsuited to the California lifestyle. Big cities and warm weather were getting old fast — just like train rides — despite all the luxury and attention. They wanted to go home — and they thought they soon would.

Balto’s Race to Nome was only about 20 minutes long, but it was a smash. The whole country wanted to see it. As Lesser said, “Man and dog were fresh from the frozen north and their heroic performance was still fresh in the minds of the nation.”

Kaasen and Balto attended the film’s premier at one of Lesser’s Los Angeles theaters. Then the film was released nationwide, along with a press release so hyperbolic (HIGH-purr-bah-lik), or exaggerated, it would have embarrassed the dogs had they been able to read it!

“It is unnecessary to build up interest in Balto or Kaasen,” Lesser assured theater owners in the press release. “It is only necessary to arouse discussion of the fact that you have obtained this picture for your theater. The deed of Balto and Kaasen has gripped the imagination of every thinking adult in America. Now it is within your power to let them see the man, the dogs and the actual saving of Nome re-enacted before their eyes! No more gripping drama has ever been thrown upon the screen than the picturization of the historic exploit of a canine hero!”

The re-enactment “dwarfs fiction,” wrote Lesser. In fact, it was fiction. In Lesser’s version, Balto not only saved the team from running into ice water on the serum run, he saved Kaasen’s life when the driver fell through the ice!

According to Lesser, Balto wasn’t Kaasen’s first choice as leader — or his second, third or even fourth choice! Balto was promoted to the lead position only after the team encountered a fierce blizzard and the lead dog — unnamed in Lesser’s press release — “hesitated, then stopped.”

“Kaasen substituted another dog, and he, too, refused to go forward into the wind,” Lesser continued. “Two more dogs were tried, but each succumbed to heavy work and stopped.

“Kaasen then took Balto, the shaft dog, from his position next to the sled. Balto was the smallest dog in the outfit. Kaasen could not see the trail 20 feet in front of him. Balto literally dragged the exhausted and dispirited team until they staggered into the streets of Nome.”

Hello? What serum run was this? Was Lesser’s release based on information from Kaasen? If so, why did Kaasen change his story? Who knows, but does it really matter? No! Balto had performed with great courage — as had all the dogs that participated in the race. But those lucky dogs were back home in Alaska, eating salmon and running around snow-covered dogyards. Balto was stuck in La-La Land, which was no place for huskies.

Lesser had no further use for the dogs, and Seppala didn’t particularly want them back. So a theatrical agency booked Kaasen and the team on a long vaudeville tour across North America.

Vaudeville had been the continent’s most popular entertainment for decades. It’s a French word for a type of fun variety show that featured as many as a dozen live acts: singers, dancers, magicians, comics, unicyclists, clowns, ventriloquists, trained seals and other animal acts. Actors and actresses performed short dramatic sketches and musical comedies; monologists told long stories; poets recited their poems.

Once, Vaudeville theaters had dotted the land from the Rio Grande River to Saskatchewan — across the United States and Canada. Their stages supported thousands of traveling acts, which toured the continent endlessly, attracting large audiences everywhere.

Had it been the 1890s, touring Vaudeville might have been fun for Kaasen and the dogs. They would have met some of the most gifted dancers, singers and clowns that ever graced the world. They would have been part of a generous, large, gypsylike family with heart and spirit.

But they were not. By 1925, Vaudeville was dying and its great family had dispersed. People were packing new theaters to see movies or staying home to listen to another new form of entertainment — radio, which didn’t cost anything beyond the small monthly fee for electricity.

Most Vaudeville theaters had switched to programs offering a combination of live acts and movies — usually only one live act and several short movies. The new film studios and radio production companies had stolen most of Vaudeville’s stars.

Kaasen and the dogs spent one-and-a-half years criss-crossing the country by train, stopping at dozens of cities along the way. The dizzied dogs were crated up for days at a time in cargo cars, separated from one another and lonely.

At each theater, Kaasen, now sporting a stylish suit, bow tie and straw hat, politely recounted the story of the serum run and handed out black-and-white studio photos of Balto.

But which story did he tell? The true story? A slightly embellished story? The story in Lesser’s press release? No one any longer knows, but whichever story it was, it certainly didn’t matter to the dogs. By early July, they were unhappily experiencing the dog days of summer.

“Dog days” is a term that refers to the most oppressively hot days of summer, when dogs, especially long-haired huskies — and people — can hardly muster the energy to do anything but lie around feeling miserable. In the northern hemisphere, one of worst places to be at such times is hot, humid New York City, which is exactly where Kaasen and the dogs found themselves in the summer of 1925.