Priceless Memories - Bob Barker [56]
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Suerte (which means “luck” in Spanish) was a little beige mixed-breed dog that Dorothy Jo and I picked up one night in a restaurant parking lot. The attendant said, “She has been hanging around for several days. I give her water and something to eat from time to time.” Dorothy Jo and I decided that she should be hanging around our house and being fed on time, every time. Hence, the name Suerte.
Juan, a completely charming little dog that my mother found on the street, was a mixed breed. He was so mixed that it was impossible to tell what and how many breeds he represented. He had large ears that came to a point, short legs, a long body, and a bushy tail. He was all black in color. One day I was sitting in the living room talking with Dick Woollen, director of programming for Metromedia at the time, when Juan came up to a window and looked in at us.
Dick asked, “What kind of dog is that?”
I said, “He’s a Yugoslavian St. Azzi.”
Dick said, “A what?”
I repeated, “He’s a Yugoslavian St. Azzi. They are very rare in this country.”
Dick said, “He looks like a mutt to me.”
Mutt or Yugoslavian St. Azzi, Juan was a winner.
Enrique was a black Labrador mix, a sweet, gentle dog that captured your heart on sight. One of the nurses, Kathy Burns, who cared for my mother after her stroke found him in front of our house when she arrived for work. She brought him in, and he decided to stay. He never got on a bed unless my brother was visiting with us. Then he crawled up on Kent’s bed and slept with him. Kent thought that was pretty neat.
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I want to tell you about some of my more recent canine companions. Late one Friday afternoon, I got on the Hollywood Freeway and headed for Riverside to spend the weekend with my friend, Nancy Burnet. As usual on Friday, traffic was heavy and I did not arrive in Riverside until after dark. As I drove down a street beside a vacant lot, I saw the body of a dead dog that had been hit by a car. I continued on toward Nancy’s house, but as I drove, I became concerned about the remote possibility that the dog I had seen might not be dead, but badly injured.
When I arrived at Nancy’s home, I told her what I had seen and asked her to go back with me and check. When we reached the dog’s body and got out of the car to check it out, we heard another dog growling from some shrubbery in the vacant lot. The dog in the street was indeed dead, and it was obvious that the dog growling at us from the shrubbery—a black long-haired terrier mix—was protecting the body.
You didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out that the two dogs were companions. One had been killed by an automobile, and the other was protecting his friend. Nancy and I were able to get the dog in the shrubbery to come out to us, but he wouldn’t get in my car. He would not leave the body of his friend.
Nancy and I lifted the little body and carefully placed it on the backseat of my car, and promptly, the other dog jumped into my car to be beside his friend. It was such a beautiful display of love and loyalty that Nancy and I were both in tears.
The courageous little dog who so bravely protected the body of his friend was not wearing a collar. He had no identification of any kind. But his days of running the streets as a stray were over. I decided on the spot that he deserved the very best life that I could provide for him and that is exactly what he had for the rest of his life.
I named him Federico. He and I were in a picture together that was featured on a poster distributed all over the country during a national spay/neuter campaign sponsored, on my behalf, by CBS. That same picture of Federico and me became the most popular fan picture I had during my years on television. People didn’t just write for a picture. They wrote and asked for “that picture of Federico and Bob.”
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I also had a wonderful huge black Labrador retriever named Winston. Winston was not only a huge dog, he was a huge character