Nice Doggie

 Before there was a Spuds MacKenzie, before there was a Working Class Dog, I had my heart set on owning a Bull Terrier. You might imagine that these media images were responsible for driving the enthusiasm for this breed. You would be right. You might also ascribe a spike in the public's appreciation for bullies after seeing George C. Scott palling around with a doggie in his Oscar winning portrayal of General Patton. 

All of these images are stuck in my mind, but they were not the inspriation for my want. That came from George Booth. A lot of Georges squished into this piece. If the name George Booth isn't familiar to you, maybe you didn't spend the kind of quality time I did reading The New Yorker. Okay, I confess. I wasn't there for the articles, though I did from time to time check out Pauline Kael's movie reviews. I was there for the cartoons. And there were plenty of them that sailed wildly over my head. Metropolitan types complaining about their analysts or mice livng in rent controlled holes in the wall. I wasn't there for those. I was there for Charles Addams, who tweaked my monster movie sensibility. And shortly after that, I went looking for George Booth. 

The cartoons of Mister Booth were silly and filled with quirky little details. Like yakking cats and the inevitable bull terrier. These scruffy, ill-tempered beasts were not featured players. Generally relegated to the background, these were not Snoopy. Not at all. But they had character to spare and kept me looking for their master's drawings each and every week. Eventually I was the happy recipient of collections of George Booth cartoons. No longer did I need to skim through all that Manhattan esoterica to find those furiously scratching bullies. Page after page of all that oddness. 

I never owned a bull terrier. But when I think of them, I think of George Booth. He died last week at the age of ninety-six. He had stopped drawing dogs some time ago, but they continue to scramble about my mind. George Booth scribbled on the Terra. He and his furry friends will be misssed. Aloha, George.