Mark Dunn - Ibid - A Life

I know you think it foolish for me to believe that Jesus had a collie. I know that collies come from Scotland. But is it really inconceivable that the dog could have made his way down to the Holy Land to be with our Lord and Savior? Collies have covered far greater distances, I assure you. And who is to say that Jesus did not, himself, go to Scotland, and find the dog among the heather? The Mormons believe that Jesus crossed the Atlantic Ocean to spend time in the American west, so to me it is entirely believable that He could easily have found Ruggles in the Scottish highlands and brought him down to the land of milk and honey.

I find the pictures in the book very moving. I agree that there are perhaps a couple that should not have been included. I don’t think that Jesus knew lawn bowling; I think the author and illustrator should have devoted themselves only to known events from the life of Christ. And I still believe that on the day that Jesus performed the miracle of the loaves and fishes, there were no gnaw-bones in that basket. It was not customary in that day for people to take their dogs to public events. But these are minor objections. Our Holy Savior and His Dog is a good book and I would recommend it to anyone.

People who do not understand our faith sometimes laugh. I recall that you could not hold back a chuckle when you saw the picture of Ruggles licking the face of Lazarus to help Jesus wake him from the dead. But let me assure you, that for someone who believes as strongly as I do in Jesus’s canine companion, it is no laughing matter.

It is all a matter of faith, as you can understand.

Yours,

Venetia

5. Other bizarre friendships enlivened his retirement.Author’s interview with Odger Blashette. Among those within that small subset of friends who didn’t happen to be seeking philanthropic or entrepreneurial sponsorship from Jonathan was Roger Tierney, an inmate at Washington State Correctional Center. Tierney had originally written Jonathan in error, thinking he was setting up a long-term pen-pal exchange with a Jacqueline Blasset (Not to confused with the actress Jacqueline Bisset who would have been much too young at the time to be corresponding with an incarcerated felon.) Jonathan courteously redirected the letter, but this kindness only prompted Tierney to begin corresponding with Jonathan as well, especially when he learned that his inadvertent pen pal had overcome a disability to become a leader in the male deodorant industry, and did so without breaking any laws.

Tierney’s notoriety, was, in fact, well known to Jonathan. Twenty years earlier the felon had kidnapped several contract-bridge-playing residents of the Setting Sun Senior Center in Bellingham and removed them all to a remote logging camp in British Columbia. Here the eight women were forced to participate in a grueling birling competition to the delight of Tierney and his logging buddies. The muscle-sore senior citizens were rescued by Canadian Mounties within a couple of days, and returned home safe and sound, but the crime drew Tierney stiff sentences from both the Canadian and American judicial systems, following jurisdictional wrangling that ended in joint penal custody. “It was worth it, though,” Tierney once admitted to Jonathan, “seeing them old ladies spinning those logs like the jacks do. I even noticed a smile on a couple of their rosy faces. ’Bet they never thought they’d be coming up on the end of their lives and get to roll themselves a danged log!”

6. Jonathan began to see more of Helga and less of Venetia.Author’s interview with Helga Houston. Helga was the sister of Maylene Houston Carmichael, who spent much of her adult life trying to discredit the “Refrigerator Mother” theory of autism put forth by psychologist Bruno Bettelheim and embraced by most of the members of the American psychiatric community in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary. Considered by Maylene and her supporters to be yet another misogyny-motivated attack on motherhood, Bettelheim’s belief that autistic children were created by cold and unloving mothers was never recanted by the famous psychologist and was only slowly (and one imagines, mostly reluctantly) surrendered by his colleagues. Maylene’s frustration (she was the mother of an autistic son) and rage against Bettelheim knew no bounds, and resulted in one particularly unpleasant incident in which she mailed mice feces to the him at his office at the University of Chicago’s Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School for Disturbed Children, disguised as a giftpack of gourmet peppercorns. It is not known if Bettelheim ingested them.

7. Davison often turned up in the strangest of places.There isn’t much doubt in my mind as to the identity of the older man hurling the large rock in the foreground of the photograph. The question, though, is what Davison was doing among the Peruvian demonstrators who had taken to pelting Vice President Nixon’s car with stones during his 1958 Good Will Tour gone bad. Davison’s diary is frustratingly silent on the whole episode. None of the correspondence I have examined from the period indicates why he took the side trip from Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he was scheduled to attend a meeting with South American patent officials on Jonathan’s behalf. In fact, there is no indication from any of the sources I have consulted for this period just how Davison felt about the U.S. vice president at that moment, although two years later during the 1960 presidential election he remarked that Nixon reminded him of a druggist he once knew who used to chase teenaged pocket thieves out onto the sidewalk with an extended grocer’s claw and who was also thought to have a lifelong addiction to Carter’s Pills.

8. “ Her name is Charette. Jonny, I actually think she’s the one.”Harlan Davison to Jonathan Blashette, 14 May 1958.

9. “ Sorry. My mistake. She isn’t the one.”Harlan Davison to Jonathan Blashette, 15 May 1958.

10. Charette was a cruel mother.According to Griswold Lanham’s article “Harlan Davison” in Entrepreneurial History (13, 1990, 25–42), Davison’s girlfriend purchased a Betsy McCall doll for her daughter’s birthday in June 1958, then refused to buy it clothes. “Betsy lives in a nudist colony,” Charette told Davison in a voice that reminded him of an overly peckish Eve Arden, “and by the way, it ain’t really none of your beeswax.”

Feeling sorry for young Vicki, Davison bought a wardrobe for the doll himself and delivered it to the little girl at her grammar school. Vicki’s second-grade teacher, a Miss Wingfield, thinking the clothes were for Vicki, chastised Davison in front of the class for not knowing the girl’s size. Vicki came to the defense of Davison, whom she had begun to fantasize as war hero, fireman, and/or possibly even her birth father. Having forgotten the name of the naked birthday doll, she pretended that the clothes were, indeed, intended for her. When she attempted to pull one of the little dresses over her head; it became snagged about the forehead. “I’ve made a real mess of things here,” Davison is reported to have apologized. “Come on, Vicki. Let’s go get some ice cream.” With avuncular tenderness, Davison took the little girl by the hand and guided her to the door, respecting the fact that the Betsy McCall dress draping her head partially obscured her vision. The result was a bit of stumbling that to some of the children resembled a funny dance. Davison and Vicki were blocked at the door by Miss Wingfield, who proceeded to blow her recess whistle painfully close to Davison’s left ear. Amidst a wash of playground-minded elementary school children flooding out of their respective classrooms and into the hallways, followed by angry teachers glaring at Wingfield, harumphing, and tapping their watches, Harlan was escorted to the principal’s office by two officious safety patrol boys. He was held there until police arrived to book him for attempted kidnapping. In the confusion Vicki disappeared and was later found alone, seated on the down end of a stationary teeter-totter, clutching tightly to her chest the doll clothes Davison had given her and singing softly and wistfully a song she had made up about ponies.