Curio Cabinet

It's Flashback Friday! Enjoy some dog-themed curios in honor of National Pug Day.
 
It all started with an article. In late 1927, Dorothy Harrison Eustis penned a piece for The Saturday Evening Post about her experience training canines to aid soldiers visually impaired during World War I. Inspired, a 19-year-old blind man named Morris Frank wrote to Eustis asking to be paired with a dog, and vowing to advocate for the animals' ability to give blind people their independence back. His impassioned plea worked, and Eustis invited him to her dog training school in Switzerland the following February.  

When Frank returned to the U.S., he was accompanied by his new set of eyes: a female German Shepherd named Buddy. Throngs of reporters tailed the pair as they navigated through New York City's busy streets. Frank's one-word telegram to Eustis said it all: "Success." Shortly thereafter, the pair established their non-profit organization, named after the title of Eustis' original Post article: The Seeing Eye.
 

It took persuasion and time to get people comfortable with the idea of guide dogs sharing public spaces with people, but Frank and Buddy traveled extensively across the U.S. as ambassadors of the cause. Soon, both the public and government warmed up to the idea; in 1990, the Americans with Disabilities Act granted service dogs public access.  

Since 1929, The Seeing Eye has matched 16,000 Americans with their own "buddy." Thanks to donations, human applicants are only charged a nominal fee between $1 and $150, and no one has ever been turned down based on inability to cover the costs. The process for becoming a Seeing Eye dog has also evolved, with puppies bred and trained at special facilities to ensure good health, aptitude, and socialization skills. After about eight years of service, most dogs retire to loving homes.  

As for Frank and Buddy? They worked together until Buddy's passing a decade later. To keep her legacy alive, Frank named all of his subsequent guide dogs after her—five more Buddies in total. Man's best friend is also man's "declaration of independence," as Frank put it. Attagirl!  

This lovable Londoner is actually from Peru! On this day in 1958, British author Michael Bond published A Bear Called Paddington the first installment in the long-running children’s book series. Bond first created the character after he brought home a teddy bear for his wife, and began to imagine a backstory for the stuffed animal. His wife named the bear Paddington, after the railway station that Bond lived near. The character’s backstory was inspired by images of Jewish refugee children arriving in Britain and British children being evacuated to the countryside during World War II. Like the refugee children, Paddington arrived in London alone, carrying only a suitcase. Hailing from “Darkest Peru,” he had been sent over by his Aunt Lucy, with an attached note that read, “Please look after this bear. Thank you.”
 
He was then found and adopted by the Brown family, with whom he shares many of his adventures. The well-mannered, marmalade-obsessed bear went on to star in 70 books in 30 languages, several television series and two critically-acclaimed films. Even someone who has never read or watched anything Paddington-related is likely to have seen him in the form of a stuffed toy. Paddington’s look is iconic: he is always portrayed with his hat, given to him by his Uncle Pastuzo, and a duffle coat. He often wears a pair of Wellington boots, or “wellies", but they weren’t originally part of his design. They were added in 1972, when the toy manufacturer Gabrielle Designs began making a stuffed toy of him and gave him children’s wellies to help him stand upright. The bears that Gabrielle Designs produced became wildly popular—so popular, in fact, that the company had to litigate against counterfeiters who were producing their own versions of the character. Shirley Clarkson, who started Gabrielle Designs with her husband, wrote about the experience in her book, Bearly Believable: My Part in the Paddington Bear story. According to her, “There were little old ladies with arthritis knitting just one bear for the church bazaar on one hand, and on the other hand a large Jack the Lad toy manufacturer in Blackbook dressing cheap fairgound bears in duffle coats with boots made from oil-cloth.” If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then at least there’s no doubt that Paddington remains popular to this day (if his most recent 2017 movie wasn’t a big enough clue!)

 
[Image description: A store window display featuring various stuffed Paddington Bears.] Credit & copyright: Rick Ligthelm

Hold your horses! Despite prevalent myths to the contrary, there’s not actually much evidence that this historic blaze was caused by a cow. The Great Chicago fire, which was extinguished on this day in 1871 after three days of destruction, burned a 3.3-square-mile section of the Windy City to the ground. Not only did the blaze kill at least 300 people and leave another 100,000 homeless, it caused around $222 million in damage and destroyed most of Chicago’s business district.
 
Legend still holds that The Great Chicago fire was started by “Catherine O’Leary’s cow.” Supposedly, on the night of October 8, a cow in Patrick and Catherine O’Leary’s De Koven Street barn kicked over a lantern, setting nearby hay alight. While it is true that a small shed on the O’Leary’s property was the first to be consumed by the fire, historians have never been able to ascertain the blaze’s specific cause. In truth, it could have been caused by almost anything. At the time the fire started, Chicago was in the midst of a months-long drought, and the city's infrastructure made it particularly vulnerable to fire. More than two-thirds of Chicago’s structures, from buildings to walkways to streets, were made of wood. Many houses had tar or shingle roofs, which were extremely flammable. On top of that, dry winds on the night of the fire were blowing toward the northeast, carrying embers toward the city center.
 
Human error also played a role in the fire’s spread. Since telephones weren’t commonplace yet, the Chicago Fire Department operated on a fire alarm telegraph system. This system relied on watchmen, stationed atop the city’s Courthouse tower, to spot fires in the distance and alert a nearby telegraph officer to their locations. The telegraph officer used a telegraph machine to send an electronic signal to the alarm box of the firehouse nearest to the blaze. On the night of the Great Chicago Fire, around 9 p.m., watchman Matthias Schaffer spotted the fire in the distance, but mistakenly guessed its location as being around a mile away from the O’Leary’s property. The wrong alarm box, in another fire district, was rung. When Schaffer realized his error and reported it to the telegraph officer, the officer refused to send another alarm to the correct district, believing it would confuse firefighters. Because of this, at least two firefighting steam engines near the O’Leary’s property ignored the alarm.
 
The fire began to spread rapidly. Soon, the majority of Chicago’s 185 firefighters, from every district, were using their combined 17 horse-drawn steam pumpers to fight the blaze. They hoped that the fire would be contained by the nearby South Branch of the Chicago River. Winds intensified around midnight, however, and flaming debris blew across the river, setting the South Side Gas Works plant ablaze. Soon, even Chicago’s courthouse was on fire. Mayor Roswell B. Mason just managed to call for aid from nearby towns and evacuate the building before it collapsed around 2:30 a.m.
 
In perhaps the unluckiest twist of all, fire whirls began forming. These meteorological phenomena happen when superheated, rising air comes into contact with cooler air, causing it to spin like a tornado. Due to the fire whirls, flames soon engulfed the city’s waterworks building. As the building collapsed, the city’s water mains went dry, leaving firefighters no way to combat the fire. It burned unchecked as massive crowds of terrified Chicago residents fled the city.
 
By October 9, the fire had consumed Chicago’s most densely populated areas and begun to burn itself out in the city’s sparsely-populated north side. Rain finally began to fall, further slowing its spread. When the fire finally went out, on October 10, martial law was declared, in order to protect the ravaged city from looting and violence. U.S. General Philip H. Sheridan was placed in charge of keeping the city safe as aid poured in from surrounding states. Several large out-of-state companies, such as Wisconsin’s Schlitz Brewing Company, provided supplies such as fresh water. Over the next two years, Chicago was able to rebuild most of its infrastructure (this time using fewer flammable materials). Today, one of the four red stars on Chicago’s flag stands for the Great Chicago Fire, forever marking it as one of the most important events in the city’s history.

 
[Image description: A lithograph of people fleeing across the Randolph Street Bridge, in Chicago, as buildings burn in the background.] Credit & copyright: Chicago in Flames by Currier & Ives, 1871, Public Domain