Evil Breeding by Susan Conant Read Free Book Online Page B

foreign judge a delightful fellow. I couldn’t afford flowers. I drove an old car, or I did when the engine started, anyway. I hadn’t even entered Rowdy in any of the upcoming summer shows because I couldn’t swing the fee for his handler, and I couldn’t count on the Bronco to transport him. So what? I was a step away from modestly declaring Forstmeister Marquandt a delightful fellow. Glory, glory. I could hardly wait to keep the Friday appointment.
    I should have spent the intervening days working on the book and writing freelance articles. I might even have drafted my next column for Dog’s Life. Instead, I devoted myself to what I rationalized as research. I surfed the Web and exchanged e-mail. Searching the Web for references to Geraldine R. Dodge produced an overwhelming number of Web sites that thanked the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation for supporting activities Mrs. Dodge had cared nothing about. In 1955, Mrs. Dodge drafted a will leaving the bulk of her fortune to St. Hubert’s Giralda, an animal shelter she had founded in 1938. In October of 1962, she signed a will stipulating that most of her estate be used to establish the Foundation, a charity with broad goals that have little to do with dogs. Seven months after signing that will, she was declared mentally incompetent. She was, too. If she’d been in her right mind, she’d have made sure that her money went where her heart had always been. A court battle raged after her death. Eventually, the second will was recognized as the valid one. Outrageous! A perversion of justice. Here was a woman who had devoted a long lifetime to worshiping dogs. Then, in a burst of dementia, she suddenly got the crazy idea of funding this ridiculous foundation. And did the court dismiss that second will as the product of a mind gone mad? No, it did not. Thus the zillions of Web sites thanking the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation for supporting environmental causes, education, public television, National Public Radio, and other worthwhile endeavors about which she didn’t give a damn.
    That’s not quite true. She did give a damn about some of the causes, and she didn’t entirely disinherit animals. St. Hubert’s Giralda ended up with a fair chunk of money. And during her lifetime, Mrs. Dodge collected art, supported the arts, and donated generously to civic and charitable activities in New Jersey. She collected both dog art and... I’m at a loss for words here. Normal art? In about 1931, she bought a marble bust of Benjamin Franklin by Jean-Antoine Houdon. After her death, the British Rail Pension Fund paid $310,000 for it. It subsequently cost the Philadelphia Museum of Art a whopping three million. And it wasn’t a bust of a dog named Benjamin Franklin, either. In 1935, Mrs. Dodge presented Madison, New Jersey, with what is still its town hall, the Hartley Dodge Memorial Building, given, of course, in memory of her son. The original estimate of the cost of the town hall was $500,000. It ended up costing $800,000. Mrs. Dodge apparently didn’t balk at coming up with an extra $300,000, and she paid for all the equipment and furnishings as well.
    The Houdon bust was on the Web. So was Madison’s town hall. Over and over, so was the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival. I mentally drafted a frivolous submission:
     
I think that I shall never see
A hydrant lovely as a tree.
Hydrants are made by fools like thee,
But only God gave Dog the tree.
     
    Doggerel! What could be more suitable? When I’d completed that phase of my research, I composed a lot of e-mail messages to individuals and to lists like Malamute-L, Showdogs-L, and Dogwriters-L in which I reminded people that Elizabeth Kublansky and I were doing a book about Morris and Essex, and were eager to hear from anyone who had information about the shows or about Mrs. Dodge. I modestly mentioned in passing that B. Robert Motherway, the well-known shepherd breeder and retired AKC judge, was sharing his memories of Morris and