January 5, 2007

• Sound Familiar?

  ASSOCIATED PRESS

  1:53 a.m. January 5, 2007

  Associated Press Seven months after disappearing from her yard in Colorado, a rat terrier named Daisy walked into the arms of Tracie Crass in Knoxville, some 1,300 miles away. Thanks to Crass, Daisy got an airplane ride home.

  KNOXVILLE, Tenn. – Seven months after disappearing from her yard in Colorado, a rat terrier named Daisy walked into the arms of Tracie Crass in Knoxville, some 1,300 miles away. Thanks to Crass, Daisy got an airplane ride home.

  Crass spotted 2-year-old Daisy wandering down her sidewalk on Christmas night. She assumed the 12-pound dog had slipped out of its home amid holiday festivities, so she brought the pooch on her porch and waited for its owner to come looking for it.

  When no one showed up by the next day, Crass telephoned the number on Daisy’s rabies tag. She reached Daisy’s veterinarian, who contacted Daisy’s owner, Vonda Lundstrom of Aurora, Colo.

  “The kindness of people gives you a reason to believe,” Lundstrom said. “It’s the best Christmas present.”

  A cell phone photograph of Daisy sent to Crass confirmed it was the same little dog that dug a hole under the fence at Lundstrom’s home in April and disappeared. With help from Knoxville’s Young-Williams Animal Center, Daisy flew home on Wednesday. The reunion at Denver International Airport was memorable. “She licked me. She loved on me,” Lundstrom said. “I have my baby back, that’s for sure.”

  Lundstrom has no ties to Knoxville and she assumes somebody stole Daisy. She said she has since filled in the hole under her fence. “I’m going to do everything in my power to see that it doesn’t happen again,” she said.

  ---

   And This Was My Dog Oreo’s Story, Nearly 20 Years Ago

  

  After moving 200 miles from the town I went to college in to Chicago, the very first Friday night we lived in our new house, Oreo somehow pawed the door open in the middle of the night and ran out to play with another dog. I vaguely remember waking up, but was too tired to get up. After all, Oreo ALWAYS came back home. What I forgot however, was that there had been a major flood in Chicago that week. Oreo was in new surrounding and couldn’t find his scent back to our new house. He knew that home was “south” so he started walking. By noon that day (roughly 8 hours), Oreo had walked 45 miles to Oak Brook, Illinois. He stopped off at the Western Open Golf Tournament, where a Chicago Tribune photographer snapped this photo, which appeared on the front page of the paper’s Sports section that Sunday. Seeing this unfold, a woman (an angel really) named Lola Proulx, bought 8 hot dogs and earned Oreo’s trust by feeding him. She was able to get him to the Humane Society, where they traced his tags back to our former home, where I had already called with my new contact information. I went to pick Oreo up the following Monday, 60 miles south of where he first started his journey. From that day forward he was scared to death of trains, which led me to believe he had a very close call with a train on his journey south. He went on to live 9 more wonderful years, and even survived an assassination attempt by a local campus keystone cop, and a close call with a herd of massive elk. He appeared on the second season of Friends, and made other front page headlines throughout his 12 year storied life. He traveled with me through 30 of the 50 states, and was never on a leash a day in his life. God love ya Oreo!

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