winner's choice: the Dog with the Name

i can't find my 1958 St. Anne's School yearbook, but i'm sure that one of the attributes characterizing me was having "the Dog with the Name." My friends would say, "tell us your dog's name again." and now, 50 years later, here comes that dog into my life again.

you will recall that the winner and honorable mentions of the March photo contest were awarded the prize of either writing an entry for the blog or suggesting a topic that i would treat for the blog.

the first request was from Sally Smith, who asked me to write "something about that dog you had with the long name." Sally is one of my Virginia cousins, so she has a long memory of Henshaw family hyperbole.

the dog: a beautifully marked purebred german shorthair pointer, liver and white. one of a series of hunting dogs that my father owned. these dogs lived in a kennel in our back yard. they were working dogs, trained to follow the scent of quail, and instinctively freeze on point when the bird was found to be nearby. in addition to being an excellent shot, my father was known as a very good trainer and sometimes he took a young dog in to work with for a friend. these bird dogs were not pets; they never came in the house. he would hide an old sock soaked in quail blood somewhere in the long grass and say to the dog, "hunt dead. hunt deeeead" to train them to retrieve a bird he'd shot, which was not necessarily part of their nature.

my father was very gentle and patient with them, rarely raising his voice. he was generous with pats on the head and milkbone treats and the dogs looked up to him adoringly with their big, brown, liquid eyes. when they saw that he was putting his guns and hunting jackets in the car, their tails wagged furiously and they smiled expressively.

other bird dogs we had while i grew up were named Judge and Arizonia, "Zonie" for short.

we called the Dog with the Name "Jeff." that was his nickname. his full name was

Thomas Jefferson Washington Jackson Paul Dabney Alonzo Anselmo Anthony Archibald Airpump Funkhouser Blinko Dynaflow Demarkley Randolph Montmorency Garbage Scow Henshaw.

a good memorization task for a child.

i liked Jeff a lot. he was trim, athletic, and tolerated the games i liked to play with him. my mother said that Jeff used to keep an eye on me when i was a little girl out playing in the yard, guarding me.

Jeff once took just a tiny nip at a mailman's pants and thereafter was required by law to wear a muzzle. this was a contraption of leather straps, which suggested a bridle to my horse-crazy mind, so i rigged up some long rawhide boot laces to make reins. you can see that the brown markings on his back suggested a saddle. i would have liked to ride him but i was too large and heavy.




my grandfather Nevil Henshaw died long before either Jeff or i were born, but i think i can detect his influence on Jeff's name, particularly in the string of "A" names. he was a novelist and a short story writer. one anecdote about him is that he would often change the names of family and friends: "you're not a Sarah today; you're a Nancy," or "Frank can't be right; Harold does the trick." and then that would be your new name until he changed it again on a whim.

maybe this influenced my father, who encouraged me to add names after the A's. Dynaflow comes from the automatic transmission introduced by Buick and much praised by my salesman father. Demarkley and Randolph were the surnames of two sisters who were artists and great friends of my mother (this was Mrs. Thomas Jefferson Randolph IV, not to be confused with Mrs TJR V, formidible headmistress of St. Anne's) . i think Montmorency was a name my father suggested to add some British class to the end, just before the more realistic Garbage Scow. Jeff did have a tendency to wolf down any tasty garbage he found, just as our faithful Annie did.

so thanks to Sally for suggesting this nostalgic topic and thanks to JM, who helped scan the photos and does clever things with photoshop to make them look great. all the strange layout mistakes that happen are the result of my ineptitude.