1 Events circa 1942-1963.
Written January 1992.
Two-year-old Charley and Skippy the dog sat in a corner of the kitchen, swapping biscuits. Charles was eating the dog bone, and Skippy the aseptic Arrowroot biscuit meant for the sterile diet of a baby. At that moment, I gave up sterilizing the bottles and utensils Charley used.
Skippy, a wire-haired, little tan terrier puppy, was the dumbest critter of any litter ever conceived. He refused to learn or respond to any commands. Worst of all, he couldn’t be housebroken.
He was canine crazy, feeling it his doggy duty to prevent all traffic from going down our street without a noisy protest. He’d run out barking viciously at cars, yapping and nipping at their tires.
This misguided act of vigilance proved his undoing. He got a fractured skull that paralyzed his hind legs. The vet mercifully ended his misery, but caused a little boy heartbreak.
The little boy soon found solace in adopting a leghorn hen given to us [two years later, ed.] during meat rationing by a kind farmer who didn’t want us to starve. In fact, he gave us two hens. My husband and Charley killed the first hen so I could butcher and prepare it as my grandmother had taught me.
The killing was such a trauma for both father and son that they could not endure it again. Father said, “I took the Hippocratic oath to preserve life and not destroy it.” So, hen number two was duly christened “Mrs. Noodle Soup” by its young owner. [Not so. I named her Noodle, not Mrs. Noodle Soup. ed.]
He used to place her on the handlebars of his tricycle (head toward him, tail out), where she remained as he rode up and down the block. The neighbors were highly amused at this improbable sight, taking movies of him and his unusual pet.
Mrs. Noodle Soup got lonesome when Charley went to Kindergarten. She would follow me about the yard and peck at my toes. Was she looking for corns?
She usually stayed on our property, but one noon, I received a phone call from a neighbor. “Mrs. Dial, Mrs. Noodle Soup is walking down the middle of South Sagamore.” Luckily, the owner came home for lunch at that moment and was dispatched to retrieve her.
Mrs. Noodle resided happily in our garage for several years, roosting in the rafters at night. This was a good arrangement because the children had to feed her and clean up after her.
All went well until one fateful night when the garage door was left open. A raccoon or fox from the Metropolitan Park entered and did her in. Only some blood and a few white feathers remained to tell of her sad end, and again a little boy suffered most from the loss.
I received a phone call from the president of the Youth Fellowship of Fairview Baptist Church when Charley was about eight. She said a tiny black and white puppy had been dropped off at their meeting by some unknown person.
They had named it “Buttons and Bows” after the popular song of the day. It had black spots on its back resembling buttons and a big black spot like a bow across its rump.
She had taken it home with her, but because they already had a pedigreed dog, her mother wouldn’t let her keep a mutt. “Wouldn’t I like to take it for my little boy?” I wanted to shout “no,” but instead, I politely said we would come and look at it.
Grandmother, Charley, and I drove over to see this homeless little puppy. It was a trembling, frightened little bundle of black and white fur, a black face, big floppy ears, appealing brown eyes, and a long scraggly white tail. It seemed to be part Collie, some Dalmatian, and 57 other varieties. Of course, she stole our hearts, and we took her home, where she resided for 14 years.
Little did we dream that she would earn from us the title of “Pedigreed Mutt with the Highest Canine IQ in Dogdom.” My husband said if she had been male and not already named, we would have named her “John the Baptist” because of her origin.
Button’s supreme aim in life seemed to be to please her family. She was housebroken in three or four days. She obeyed commands promptly. Bob and Charley soon had her doing tricks like shaking hands, standing up and begging, rolling over, saying her prayers, and playing ball. Charley said, “She thinks she’s a people.”
Buttons even allowed the boys to swing her through the air by a rope held in her mouth. I feared she would lose all her teeth or that we would surely have to seek a doggie dentist, Heaven forbid. The vet’s bills for the necessary shots were high enough.
At one of her earliest visits to the vet, we asked if she wouldn’t be better looking with her long scraggly tail cut off. It was a good thing he refused to do it, for later the fur on her tail gave her an air of distinction by becoming a beautiful white plume.
We were all very hurt when one of the boy’s friends came over with his squat little pedigreed Scottie and remarked that our gangly, long-legged Buttons was “the ugliest dog he’d ever seen.” He didn’t know about “love me, love my dog.”
Buttons was such a friendly dog. Our friends were her friends, and she was always glad to greet them. It was a shock to learn that she was a racist. If there had been a KKK for dogs, she would have qualified for membership.
This is the way we discovered this flaw in her character. One stormy winter morning, a lost black woman came to our back door, trying to find her house for the day. She handed us a paper with a name and partial address scrawled on it. We invited her into the warm kitchen and gave her a cup of coffee to sip while we looked up the name.
Just then, Buttons came rushing into the room, barking furiously. She spread her front feet apart, lowered her head, and the fur on her neck stood up. She bared her teeth and growled at the woman. We thought she was going to attack, so Doctor forcefully removed her from the room.
The woman thanked us for the directions and left. Then we wondered, “Why did Buttons behave in such a belligerent manner?”
Suddenly, we remembered Charley and the boy across the street had been walking their dogs together last summer. They had tied their leashes together to free their hands to play with their yo-yos. The dogs ran happily down the sidewalk, upending a black woman on the way to the bus.
She fell with the leashes wrapped around her legs, thus grounding the dogs. She gave them some mean whacks with her umbrella. The dogs howled, and the boys joined the fracas to free their pets from this undeserved punishment.
Lucky, the big black dog, took off for home, dragging Buttons along with him, while the boys followed. The woman watched where they went and followed also.
She was so irate that she threatened to sue the parents. A sincere apology, some sweet talk, and a little cash soothed her feelings, and she finally went off to her bus. Chas. did not bring Buttons home until the woman was well out of sight, for fear she would come to our house with the same threats.
Could this black woman have been the same one who appeared at our kitchen door the following winter? Buttons may have thought so. Perhaps the person who hurt Buttons made Buttons hate all black women. That is a mystery that will never be solved.
Buttons had two heroic episodes in her life. One was when we left her in my daughter’s East Side Larkspur Lane home for safekeeping, which is near Brentwood Hospital. We were in Florida, avoiding a cold winter.
Buttons decided to walk home using an uncanny sense of direction. It was at least 30 miles across the city to Fairview Park, the western suburb where we lived. She made it to East 81st, in a couple of days, where a kind old couple took her in and read her tags.
They located Doctor’s office by finding his name in the phone book. Buttons was rescued immediately, and great relief was felt by all, especially Buttons.
The other episode took place in the summer when our family and a few friends decided to picnic on our farm seven miles south of Wooster. We went Quaker fashion in two cars with Doctor, the boys, and Buttons in the lead car. I drove behind with the ladies of the clan.
I remembered thinking how cute Buttons looked silhouetted against the windshield, sitting on the front seat by the driver with her ears flopping in the wind, eagerly waiting for arrival at the farm. That very word sent her into doggie rapture.
Our small caravan stopped briefly in Berea to refuel the men’s car. Our next stop was in Wooster at the Wooster Farm Dairy, where we always stopped to fill up on their delicious country ice cream. When we all met, the first thing we asked was “Where is Buttons?” The boys said, “We thought she was with you.”
Without any argument or refreshments, the frightened boys hopped back in their car and retraced the 45 miles back to the gas station in Berea. There sat Buttons on the tree lawn, surveying each passing car, hoping to see her family. It was a great relief and a happy reunion for all concerned.
Buttons must have sat there for nearly two hours waiting for her family after chasing a cat or doing whatever prompted her to jump from the car. We felt she was smart to wait at the place of separation from her family.
A quirk of fate or aftermath to this episode came when our neighbors told us later that they had passed that gas station, had seen Buttons sitting there, and remarked to each other, “That looks just like the Dial’s dog!” They continued, thinking it was impossible.
Buttons became my shadow when Charles went away to college and subsequently joined the Strategic Air Command. If I started upstairs, she would beat me to the top and wait on the landing, waving her plume of a tail. When I got in the car, she would coax me to go too. While I was gone, she would sit vindictively in a forbidden chair if I refused to take her.
Buttons’ many virtues endeared her to me. This little creature’s love and loyalty helped me survive “The empty nest syndrome” that makes so many mothers suffer when the father is away at work all day and their grown children have left to pursue their own goals. Of course, she couldn’t take the place of any one of them, but she was good company and a living companion that soothed my feelings of loss and uselessness.
It was with genuine grief that I had to take her to the vet to be put to sleep, but it would have been cruel to continue her suffering from severe old-age infirmities. I knew I could never love another dog as I loved her, and I never have.
Mary W. Dial
Transcribed July 1992.
Posted Jan 15, 1992 at 16:42.
Revised Sep 22, 2025 at 20:23. EDT.
Retrieved May 30, 2026 at 17:18.
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1Substantial poetic license taken with factual material in this essay. ed.
