<Begin Segment 32>

JY: I remember that. And I remember Bismark, our dog. You remember Bismark?

TY: Oh, yeah.

JY: That got poisoned, or something. That was a tragic event.

MY: Oh, yeah.

TY: No, Bismark is not the, Bismark is the dog that, it was in our old house in Fourteenth Avenue South.

JY: Well, did you bring him up to --

TY: That was the house that you were born in? That had the Bismark. And in the back we had a great big dog house?

JY: No, I don't remember that, but I remember, I'm sure that Bismark was at Beacon Hill, wasn't he?

MY: Well, we had more than one... we had more than one, yeah.

TY: We had, Beacon Hill School, we had Felix, that was a German police -- and we had a collie.

JY: No, the one I remember is a German shepherd.

MY: Yeah, because I think we had more than one --

TY: Oh, a German, well no, that was Felix.

MY -- we had more than one, no, we had more than one Bismark.

TY: No.

MY: Yeah, we did. 'Cause we lost one, and then Dad got another German shepherd and we called it Bismark.

TY: We did?

MY: Yeah, and then after that we had --

TY: On Beacon Hill?

MY: Yeah.

TY: Did we have -- because we had a German police dog there called Felix.

MY: Yeah, I remember that, too.

TY: You remember that?

JY: I don't remember Felix. I just remember the name Bismark. [Laughs]

TY: And the Bismark that we're --

JY: So I'm inclined to agree with her. We had another one.

TY: Well, Bismark Number One, if that's the case -- I don't remember the second one -- but he used to like to lick rocks.

MY: Oh.

TY: Remember, and we used to attach him to our wagon? That was when we were still little kids. And we'd throw the rock and three of us would be on the wagon, and the dog goes, choo. And we'd go flying in ten different directions? Don't you remember that?

MY: Yeah, I kind of remember about the rock. Isn't that funny? You remember... that's a funny thing.

TY: Yeah, he was a big dog. And he bit the newspaper boy one time, and I think Dad was hauled into the court.

MY: Oh yeah, I remember that was --

TY: And I don't know how that was resolved, but he was a big dog.

MY: Yeah, he was let out -- I was telling Jeni about that, right? About the dog that this couple whose boy -- was he a newspaper boy?

TY: Yeah.

MY: A delivery boy?

TY: A delivery -- no, newspaper boy.

MY: Yeah. But the dog apparently really didn't bite him, he just kind of scared him. And the parents apparently burned him and then took him to court and said the dog bit this child. And I remember Dad telling me about this years later. That they, the judge was furious -- that they had the child examined by a doctor, they found that the child had been burned with some kind of an object.

TY: Burned instead.

MY: And, in order to sue our family. And so the judge said, "Any parent who would put their child through something like this," and really got very angry. So that's how he, he didn't get --

TY: Oh, I see. I didn't remember that part.

MY: Yeah, he got out, he was not...

TY: But I knew that he was hauled into court.

MY: Yeah.

TY: So that's when we were still, when we lived in the house in Fourteenth Avenue. Fourteenth --

MY: Yeah, so Mom was saying, well fortunately that was settled, because, to their favor.

TY: Oh, that right. That Bismark, that dog was there before you were born. So that's why you don't remember --

MY: It was that first dog, yeah.

TY: Maybe we did -- gosh, I don't remember that second Bismark.

MY: So we had, if he remembered the, we had another Bismark.

TY: I'll be darned.

JY: And he got poisoned.

MY: Yeah.

JY: I remember, I remember being with him when --

TY: Well, Felix got poisoned, too.

JY: -- he went down into the basement and died.

TY: We had that coal chute window in, below our kitchen? And I think the poison was put into that, thrown through that window in the basement, the dog ate it and died.

JY: Yeah, I don't remember what the circumstances were.

MY: Well, a lot of people were kind of fearful of German shepherds, you know.

JY: Yeah. 'Cause we used to let 'em run around. [Laughs]

<End Segment 32> - Copyright © 2002 Densho. All Rights Reserved.