Exclusive: A Kansas tale from Paul Koudounaris’ new book Faithful Unto Death

Private Scott and Laddie. // photo from the collection of Paul Koudounaris

Out this week from Thames & Hudson, author Paul Koudounaris’ new book, Faithful Unto Death, tells the history of “Pet cemeteries, animal graves, and eternal devotion” with emotional heft and an eye for detail. From Mr. Winbridge’s burial of a dog named Cherry at London’s Hyde Park to the dusty desert burial grounds used by RV road-trippers, Koudounaris delves into stories of pets both famous and unknown but all beloved by their owners.

For as many stories as are included in the book, some didn’t make the cut due to various reasons, and one of them has a local connection.

It’s the story of Laddie, a dog from Chanute, Kansas, and how this Airedale became a national phenomenon during World War II.

In conjunction with the release of Faithful Unto Death, we’re excited to share this tale, cut from the book, with you as a Pitch exclusive. Take a read, and check back later this week for our interview with author Paul Koudounaris about how the book came to be.

Lonseome Laddie: The Death of America’s Dog

No one outside of the town of Chanute, Kansas, had heard of an Airedale terrier named Laddie before 1941, and even there most people would have given him scant notice. He would have seemed just another dog among the many to be found in the rural parts of the state. But that changed after his owner, 22 year old Everett Scott, enlisted in the Army. This was in late 1940. Pearl Harbor still a year away from being bombed and the United States at peace even as the rest of the world fought. But everyone knew it was only a matter of time before the Americans entered the fray, and the young man was patriot enough to not want to be left on the sidelines when it happened. As a new recruit, he was shipped off to Fort Ord on the California coast.

Private Scott’s fellow citizens would have certainly considered his motives to be admirable, but Laddie had no way of understanding them. All he knew was that his human companion was gone and he was now in the care of the private’s sister, Marguerite. There is no doubt that she was a loving relation intent on providing the best for her brother’s dog, but even so she was not the person Laddie had become bonded with over the prior ten years. Sinking into depression, he ceased to eat. Days passed and then weeks as he continued to refuse food and began to slowly waste away. A local veterinarian was asked to examine him to determine if there might be something medically wrong, but the doctor, sensing his patient’s resolve, was clear in his diagnosis. This was no medical issue. Laddie, he said, is a “one man dog,” and the only cure was Private Scott, some 1700 miles away.

The story appeared in local newspapers and he was dubbed “Lonesome Laddie.” It would nowadays seem a stretch to think it would go much further than Chanute. A dog in Kansas isn’t eating, that’s sad, but certainly the world must have bigger problems? Indeed, the world did, but Laddie didn’t, and while we like to think of our own world as one that foregrounds compassion, we perhaps we underestimate what previous generations felt. The story spread around Kansas and people cared. Among them was a stringer who decided it was important enough to deserve a write up for United Press International, which was sent out over the news wire. Editors around the country felt the same compassion and printed the story in their own newspapers. Word of Laddie’s plight began to appear regionally on Feb. 5 and by the next day it had broken nationally, as people around the country picked up their morning papers and read about the lonesome dog who would rather starve himself to death than live without his human companion.

By that time Laddie had very nearly succeeded, but as his life was ebbing away the story continued to spread. America cared, as it turned out, and the compassion extended even to the Army’s high brass. One might assume that the military leaders of a nation preparing for war would turn a blind eye to a lonely dog in Kansas. Yet they instead took the time to ponder poor Laddie’s fate, coming to the conclusion that a lonely dog’s life was worth the effort it would take to save it. And if the solution was Private Scott, well . . . the normally firm regulations governing military life were suddenly found to be ambiguous, and after a couple twists of wording it was decided there was no reason Laddie couldn’t live on base as a personal pet. Problem solved. All they had to do was get him to Fort Ord. Easy enough, yes?

Not exactly. Laddie was fading fast so time was of the essence, and the Army had no plane near enough to Chanute to get him to California quickly. But Laddie had found other influential friends, among them no less than Howard Hughes. As luck would have it, Hughes had recently purchased Transcontinental Western Airlines, later known as Trans World or TWA. The airline let the Army know that a plane had been put at Laddie’s disposal and was waiting on the runway in Kansas City, Missouri, fueled up and ready to take one lonesome passenger all the way to Monterey, California, just a few miles from Fort Ord.

A plan was quickly pieced together. The next morning, Feb. 7, Laddie was to be taken by car from Chanute to a train depot. The railroad staff would look after him all the way to Kansas City, where he would be met by flight crew members and boarded on the plane. Meanwhile, the Army scrambled its best veterinarians to Monterey to tend him on arrival, while local vets were standing by at the airport in Kansas City, to check on him before the flight, and in Albuquerque, where the plane would refuel. Big, strong dogs were also being readied in case he needed a blood transfusion. As for the most important piece of all, a car was on call to pick up Private Everett Scott and whisk him to the airfield when Laddie arrived.

Laddie with TWA flight attendant. // photo from the collection of Paul Koudounaris

The public cheered the news. Laddie was no longer just a single dog in Kansas; the struggle to save him had become symbolic of the best the country could be. The nation’s idealized self image has always included the promise of succor to the most humble and downtrodden. The extent to which it was true has, of course, long been questioned by detractors, but by gosh the red, white, and blue heart of the American people was now going to prove it was no lie by saving this darned dog. Beneath the feel good moment, however, the carefully laid plans were unraveling. Laddie’s hunger strike had wrecked havoc on his body, and when he arrived in Kansas City the flight attendants found him unable stand, with his eyes appearing glazed. The veterinarian at the airport said he had a stomach infection, anemia, and heart lesions, and in his pitiable state the strain of the flight might be enough to kill him.

Laddie was given blood, an injection of glucose and saline, and fed intravenously. The veterinarian was able to stabilize him enough to board the plane, but there was more bad news. A hard, cold rain was moving across the western United States, and it now hit Kansas City, grounding Laddie’s flight. But this was no random dog on board that plane, this was America’s dog, and the pilot gunned his plane down the runaway and took off, despite the protestations of the control tower. Laddie was finally airborne, but the weather had also scrubbed the flight plan. Instead of a tidy route with a single stop in Albuquerque, he would now have to complete a complex and lengthy relay between multiple airports, with pilots standing by to carry him tag team style to each destination.

It seemed like the effort to rescue Laddie was hanging by a thread, but on Feb. 9, when he finally hit California, he was blessed by clear skies—and a surprise waiting. The owner of a Cadillac dealership, determined to do whatever he could to aid the effort, sponsored a special broadcast from radio station KDON in Monterey: Private Scott in the studio to send a message to Laddie in the air, pleading with him to hang on. An onboard radio picked up the signal over Fresno and the flight crew reported that Laddie seemed to recognize his master’s voice. It was hoped this would strengthen him for the final stretch, and by then the finish line was less than 150 miles away.

The drama of dog that until days before had been utterly unknown was now reaching a crescendo as the press descended on Monterey, and switchboards at local newspapers and radio stations were jammed with calls from around the country begging for updates. Large quantities of flowers began to arrive, sent to hospitals and veterinary offices. No one knew where the Army intended to send Laddie, so the flowers were being delivered to all possible options, a kind of early spring bloom enveloping every conceivable place a sick dog might be taken

Well wishers meanwhile arrived at the runway. Standing in rows along its sides, they began to cheer frantically as the plane came into view, as if through their collective presence they could somehow will him back to health. The plane landed amidst the mob, and all rushed forward when the door opened. Members of Private Scott’s company helped him push his way to the front of the line, but the scene was far from a triumph. Whatever vision everyone had, perhaps a sick old dog miraculously transformed into a puppy, bounding from death’s door into his owner’s arms, was replaced by reality. Laddie was capable of little more than raising his head in acknowledgment of the person he loved more than life itself, with scarcely a trace of recognition in his eyes. The only comment a distraught Scott could summon was, “He looks awful sick,” before an Army veterinarian stepped in and ordered Laddie be taken to a hospital.

There was no further news until the next day, but when it came the word was good. The Army issued a statement on Laddie’s condition, reporting that his temperature was back to normal and he was able to take nourishment on his own, warm broth alternated with milk mixed with a touch of rum. Private Scott had of course come to visit and unlike at the airfield, this time Laddie had noticeably perked up. And that wasn’t his only visitor. General Joseph Stilwell, Fort Ord’s commanding officer, was away on maneuvers but he sent his wife in his stead, and she arrived with a personal message from the general. He was known by the troops as “Vinegar Joe,” due to his often tart disposition, and he had an offer, from one salty old dog to another: if Laddie could make it out of the hospital, he’d be appointed the official mascot of the Army’s 7^th Division, a fighting force 15,000 men strong, Private Scott among them. This would give Laddie a free ride on Uncle Sam’s tab as an official resident of the base and place his name alongside some of the finest dogs the Army had known.

The public ate it up, as the news coming out made a feel good story feel all the better. Behind the scenes, however, the Army veterinarians did not feel quite so good. The vets were careful to not push back too hard against the mounting enthusiasm, but they knew that Laddie was still very weak, and that the next few days would be critical. To prevent expectations from being set too high, they made tepid attempts to caution against the overly optimistic stories being offered for public consumption. But no one was wanted to hear dour opinions. The press wouldn’t run them and the public wouldn’t listen, which is why the words that came on the afternoon of Feb. 13 burned so cruelly.

“A Brave And Aged Heart Can Stand Just So Much… Laddie Tries Hard… But Dies.” The Evening News in nearby Santa Cruz broke the story, the headline running in a single devastating row across the top of the front page, just below the paper’s masthead and above a story about the war in Europe. As the news then went out over the wires the nation shared in the shock of the sudden finality of a feel good story that wasn’t meant to be. “It’s pretty tough,” Private Scott acknowledged, but even in grief he wanted to let everyone around the country who had offered their support know that he appreciated all they had done. From flight crews to radio broadcasters to teams of veterinarians to the countless people who had offered their prayers, America had stepped up to save an ailing dog. And failed.

In the wake of Laddie’s passing, Private Scott found himself inundated with offers of Airedale terriers. It was as if everyone suddenly wanted to give him a dog; he could have seemingly had any Airedale in the country, as hundreds of letters arrived from people offering him their own dog if it might ease his aching heart. The list was headed by no less than Paulette Goddard, the wife of Charlie Chaplin and herself among the most famed motion picture stars of the day. She owned fine purebred Airedales and wanted to send Private Scott a puppy. But he turned down all the offers. If Laddie had been a one-man dog, he explained, then it was fitting that he be a one-dog man.

I had discovered Laddie’s story while I was researching my book Faithful Unto Death: Pet Cemeteries, Animal Graves, and Eternal Devotion, and fell just as in love with him as America had in 1941. I desperately wanted the story for my book and I needed to know everything possible about Laddie’s last few days. The newspapers in Santa Cruz had been at the forefront in reporting his story, much of what went out to the nation had come from there. I went up to Santa Cruz and spent a couple days running old microfiche cards through a reader, hunting for each precious detail. My book was about animal graves, and I was determined to find Laddie’s.

With all the interest surrounding him, the local newspapers had of course carried word of his funeral. He had been posthumously declared the mascot of Company G of the 17th Infantry of the 7th Army, Private Scott’s company. A grave was dug alongside the company’s flagpole, and with four soldiers serving as pallbearers a simple, a wooden casket was lowered into the ground. The hole was filled and some of the ample floral arrangements sent by the public were finally put to use and laid atop it. Taps were then played, and as a final—and certainly fitting—act a eulogy about faith and dogs was read.

I had no specific record of where the grave was, but the newspaper records gave what seemed like a solid set of clues. Fort Ord itself was no longer a military base, having been decommissioned in 1994 and turned over to the Bureau of Land Management, but there is still an archivist who works at the property. That was the obvious place to start, but when I called to inquire he had absolutely no idea what I was talking about. Was I perhaps looking for the grave of a dog named Sergeant Beans? There was, along a walkway, a grave he had seen for a dog by that name. No doubt Sergeant Beans was a very fine dog in his own right, but no, I informed him, I was inquiring about a dog named Laddie. Hadn’t he ever heard the story of Lonesome Laddie?

I gave him my best sales pitch. This was a big deal I swore, and I had the press clippings to prove it. He took some time to process the material I sent over and got back in touch. By that time I was down in Los Angeles, but if I really wanted to drive the five hours up to Fort Ord he was willing to meet with me. I was cautioned in advance not get my hopes up though, since he had no prior knowledge of the story, no one had ever reported any dog’s grave other than the aforementioned Sergeant Beans, and the chance of finding something so old out in what is now forest—especially a grave that may not have been marked by anything more than a wooden cross—was pretty much nil.

We pulled out a series of maps from 1941. In the build up to war the base was undergoing constant change, with companies of soldiers flitting about like flies over a plate of day old stew. They might be stationed in one place one day and then moved to a completely different part of the base the next, so what had seemed to me a simple task—just find out where Company G of the 17^th Infantry had been—was quickly revealed to be a practical impossibility. We could find no map listing the location of Private Scott’s company during the week of Laddie’s funeral, and without it there was effectively no way to locate the place where a flagpole once stood, beside which a wooden casket had been laid into the ground almost 80 years before.

The trip wasn’t fruitless, however. I had piqued the archivist’s interest enough that he had been doing his homework. He found out that Laddie’s story was apparently the first ever nationally syndicated from the base. Fort Ord has been in use by the Army since 1917, yet during the intervening years no story was ever deemed worthy enough to be of national interest, not until the country fell in love with a lonesome dog. It really was that big a deal, he truly was America’s dog. And the archivist had in addition come up with a real treasure: a photo of Laddie’s funeral. But there was a strangeness to the picture, he explained, as he took it out of a folder to show me: small, and printed on cardstock rather than photographic paper.

Laddie’s funeral. // photo from the collection of Paul Koudounaris

But I knew why, I knew as soon as I saw it. It wasn’t simply a photo, it was a tobacco card. In the days when soft pack cigarettes were common, small cardboard cards used to be placed in the packs to strengthen them, and they were often printed with collectible images, which would inspire customers to buy more packs, hoping to get prized cards. This is how baseball cards got their start, they were originally included in cigarette packages. Most likely there was some generic brand of cigarettes marketed towards soldiers through the base PX, and this was one of the cards that might lure them to buy a pack. Suck on those cancer sticks boys, you just might get a photo from the funeral of America’s favorite dog!

However many of those photo cards were printed, this one was the only that survived, or at least the only one I could track down. It was like a relic that gave testimony to the final, precious moment, when those boys in uniform—America’s finest—gathered to say a solemn goodbye to America’s dog. And after that moment, Laddie was gone. Buried in a grave I couldn’t find, and forgotten to history. Human heroes stand the test of time. They continue to be admired and their virtues extolled for generations, in some cases for millennia. It’s not the same with animal heroes. Maybe we prefer that they fade away so that we can bask in the illusion that loyalty and valor are uniquely human traits which set us apart from mere animals, making us something better than they? For one week he had been America’s dog, cheered from coast to coast and his passing collectively mourned. And he then faded back into an obscurity as dark as that from which he rose in Chanute.

As if the point needed to be further proven, I later found a newspaper article from the March 7, 1941, Los Angeles Times, dateline Hollywood, accompanied by a photo of Private Scott posed alongside Deanna Durbin, a popular young film actress of the day. Standing between them was a six month old Airedale terrier. It was, the paper explained, her gift to him. She had been touched by the passing of Laddie and had contacted him to offer her own dog. But Private Scott had turned down countless dogs in the immediate aftermath of Laddie’s death, he had even turned down the purebreds offered by Paulette Goddard and had proclaimed himself “a one dog man.” Yet this one, not even four weeks later, he accepted. I didn’t blame him. In fact, I bet Laddie would have approved—he loved Private Scott, after all, and wouldn’t have wanted him to suffer the same pangs of loneliness that brought his own demise. But there it was, another dog. For Private Scott, a fresh start, and for Laddie’s story a feeling of finality.

And since I had been unable to find the grave… well, the story was doomed for my book. I loved Lonesome Laddie too much to let go easily, however. I clung to that tiny photo of his funeral as a justification to keep the story around, there had to be some place in some chapter. I kept moving it around and editing it down, like a square peg seeking a home among round holes. By the second to last draft his story was down to a thousand words, which as you might guess is a fraction of what you’re reading here. At that point the manuscript was at nearly 61,000 words and I had made a deal with the commissioning editor: I could do what I wanted with the text if I brought it in under 60,000. The decision was obvious. Laddie had to go. I took a deep breath, gritted my teeth, and hit delete.

But that didn’t mean Laddie was gone again. I couldn’t give up on his story that easily and let him fade back to obscurity. One way or another, I needed to find a way to tell it, to put it in front of the eyes of readers who would see that the effort to save him was hardly the failure that I have previously labeled it. Yes, Laddie died, and his fame was fleeting. In his passing, however, he taught a nation how profound it can be to care about the most humble of creatures. That is no failure at all, and, in fact, the opposite. The compassion put on public display in the service of a lonely dog from a small Kansas town was, in its own right, a glorious triumph.

Paul Koudounaris’ Faithful Unto Death is out now from Thames & Hudson.