An item in the News today caught my eye... 'twas about famous American companies which have gone out of bizz, and not just those going under in today's slump, either. Most of the items carried the famous logos or symbols by which they were known in their prime - including this one here...
RCA or more properly, RCA Victor, was an early producer of gramaphones and Victrolas - back when "playing platters" was the only way to hear your "tunes." This doggie symbol was known as "His Master's Voice," and in the inclusive way it was usually shown, the quizzical pooch is listening at the horn of a large gramaphone (to the left)... We had a mechanical, wind-up Victrola when I was young - and I remember it and the doggie logo very well...
Long years later found me living once in southern, upscale Fairfield County, Connecticut... suburban "bedroom," as it was then-called, for New York City (not yet itself dubbed the "Big Apple", btw...). I belonged to that Army of the Damned: the suburban commuters who daily rode the 30-odd miles to and from their Manhattan offices on the bumpy, grinding cars of the old New York, New Haven & Hartford RR - themselves now mercifully retired to that Great Roundhouse Up In The Sky... These recollections are the stuff of fitful dreams now: flashing out across the trestle bridge over the Mianus River at Cos Cob - Palmer Engine Works off on the right: "The Fisherman's Friend for Fifty Years" emblazoned boldly on its stained factory walls... Port Chester's elevated station... on and on into the Upper Bronx - now running in the ancient sunken right-of-way, overhead an ever-increasing tangle of electric wires and popping, crackling trolleys or "pantagrams" where we switched from overhead to "third rail" link for the final underground dash along dark and noisome tunnels that terminated at Grand Central Station.
There was a spot up in Harlem - in the vast switching yards there - where I think incoming/outgoing NY Central commuter trains joined the fray, as we all clickety-clacked through switches and junctions beneath any number of elevated train tracks which passed above us. Sometimes, barely creeping along in heavy congestion, or otherwise just moving slowly and jerkily along. Here, young blacks at all hours pelted us from the overhead streets with stones and bones and bottles and such... while winos and assorted derelicts slept here and there in patches of weed, growing within arm's throw of the third-rails and their deadly current. Vintage commuter life a la 19 and 65, maybe... Man and Boy! Seen it all in my time! Seen it all!
One bitter, cold winter morning, as we were inching along, everyone else's nose buried in his/her NY Times financial section, I sat yawning and gazing out into the gloomy surroundings when suddenly a real, life-sized dog swirled out of the gloom - right at window height as we swept by (!) - said dog swaying gently in the breeze of our passing, and hanging right in place by means of a noose-and-rope about its neck! Every actual hair upon its body visible to my view as we slid on by...
"Wha...?"
I nudged my fellow rider:
"Did you see that?"
"See what?"
"The dog hanging there in mid-air..."
"Dog in mid-air? What dog? Dogs don't have wings you know... only pigs!"
Harumph! Captain of Industry that he was, he shook his paper and dived in once again.
(Probably from Greenwich - bemoaning the class of commuter we getting here anymore!)
I was not to be deterred. Spoke to the guy in seat ahead of me. He had not seen "the dog" either - but more curious than my seatmate, asked for details.
I gladly supplied them... "It was on end of rope - all around its neck!" (I had seen that!). And it was definitely hanging, swaying, (lifelessly, perhaps?) in the breeze.
'Hmmmm," he said,
"Very cold out ..maybe it's frozen!"
This seemed a most prescient observation!
"Of course! It was a runaway (the rope), and had headed out across the upper tracks..." (several other commuters had now joined the conversation) ...
"And it slipped and fell between the tracks!", someone added, and a sort of group acclaim took over us:
"And it caught and got hung up and strangled, and froze solid, during the night!"
It remained for but one further detail, quickly supplied by one of the listeners...
"I bet some of these Bronx kids here did it, that's what I think! (pause) Nasty little buggers!"
This was admitted by about half the company present as the most likely explanation.
But no one else had seen this apparition - not even the (jaded) old conductor (in tennis shoes - for his bunions) - who had seen and heard it all anyway in 30 years ticket taking from his Fairfield County commuters: fights, faintings, getting on and off while cars still rolling, threats, lawsuits, drunkeness, disorderliness, and general deportment expected of such privelieged classes...
That evening, esconced in a window seat on the toney "4:15" (you had to nip out early to make that one!), I was on the watch as we approached Ground Zero, but we were making a good 35 or 40 mph this time, outward bound you see, and the gloomy overhead trestles and confused interswitches were flying by in a near-blur. I saw nothing.
The next morning though, I saw it once more! But no one else did. One or two came forth however, who thought they had seen "something." By now the story was being related in other cars - and many people had noses pressed to the leftside windows as we traversed the Bronx Yards once again. Lack of confirmation only seemed to heighten belief in it all - and I was often pointed out as the "guy who discovered him." There is no anonymity like that of the suburban wage-earner commuter, so naturally I basked in my newfound fame...
The next day, he was seen by others! Several in fact! Still frozen stiff, still swinging on his rope... I had to relinquish my sole claim to fame here now at last, but it was nice to be self-reassurred I was not just going plain nuts. (I wonder if the Old Testament prophets once faced something like this: being as how they were the only ones to see and hear certain things, etc. has its attention-getting aspects, I admit - but if anyone else had ever beheld just for an instant those talking, burning, bushes and big wheels in the sky - it could at least reassure them privately they were not ready for strait-jackets just yet...H-m-m-m-m)
Anyhow, the "legend" grew: some had seen the doggie, some had not. The gambling crowd in the bar car 'made book' on it all - and took up a pool. (As usual in these matters, the conductor - Old Bill - everyone's friend - held the pot - and sold tickets as well as took them in - in his daily round up and down the aisles).
But one morning not long thereafter, the 6:15 (yeah! I used to rise very early!) "out of Stamford" stalled out - would you believe! - right at this very spot. A great shout went up in the car behind us. Some of us rushed back. A crowd was pressed to every available window seat and there was much excited chatter! And there outside the window of the midseat in the car - just inches away in fact, hung a perfect replica (down to those very doggie hairs I saw!) of "His Masters Voice" - complete in every detail - and swaying back and forth about twenty feet up in the air under an overhead elevated track. It was what it was: a papiermache' (perhaps even a more modern and durable material - a complete doggie in vacuum-formed vinyl maybe (I was once editor of a plastics tech mag), or maybe cast polyurethane, whatever) point-of-purchase advertising item (as we used to call them - maybe even a manufacturer furnished window display from somewhere). It was already a "historic" item or icon even back then, and I wish I had had some way to retain it (!). Maybe it had been tossed out in store trash somewhere and yes! "the nasty little buggers" had found it, and tied the rope around its neck and then let it down between the tracks to entertain the riders on the levels below.
Great fun while it lasted! After that, the sportin' crowd went back to mainly bridge (and drinking) in the bar car, and the rest of us to our newspaper reading, fidgeting, snoozing, and generally whiling away the tedium between hearth and home...
