Full Cry Column
March 2004

Clint Stubbe (Northern Working Airedale Terrier Association correspondent)

I apologize but this column didn't get in to Full Cry for a couple reasons one being an empty mailbag. I will continue to write what I can but a lot depends on other folks and I am not the type to bother people for material. A few notable folks have been very generous over the years submitting things to first Henry and now Kevin and I and we thank them for that. The other reason is a lack of anything to write about at my end. I have been working on our house this winter plus lion numbers around here are fairly low and I lack the funds to look for them. I spent two weeks and $250 in gas in December making a loop to keep a road open, which I was sure would produce a lion. I could have spent three times that but that's what I had. I did get called back to work for three days and in that time a lion crossed and someone called a houndsman from another town and they got him. That kind of thing dampens my enthusiasm. I have also realized my kids were suffering from my hobby and have started to get them skiing which on my budget may just about be it.

We had a cold snap a while back during which I got onto a track with the dogs. They say the Inuit have a hundred words for snow and while that may be excessive one is certainly not enough. The snow on this day was new snow and cold snow and deep snow all of which adds up to make it bottomless. Later in the year when the snow has gone through a few freeze thaw cycles the snow can have a pretty good base or layers which will keep you from going all the way down even without snowshoes or skis. The dogs and I followed this track for as long as the day allowed in the end not covering that much distance as a crow flies because the lion was hunting a creek canyon and into and out of some fifteen year old clear cuts making for a tortuous track to follow on skis. I had it much easier than the dogs since I could stay afloat while they were breaking trail over their backs. At quitting time I headed straight for the road to get to the truck before dark realizing that Buzz (hound) had already had enough as his feet were cut from previous outings and the 20 below was too much for him. He had started to backtrack so I just waited at the truck. And waited and waited. A few times I heard him down along the creek but he could not come to the horn in the dark for some reason.

ON THE TRAIL

Either he was stuck in a canyon or could not find a snow bridge to cross the creek. At midnight I went home as it was obvious he would be there all night. I would have been a lot happier leaving one of my Airedales there as they are completely comfortable on any but the coldest days but Buzz always suffers from his lack of coat in the winter. It went down to 25 below that night and I was worried I might get old Buzz back a little stiffer then I left him especially since the next morning the tracking collar put him in the same place he was the night before but after a few honks on the horn he appeared to be moving and was at the truck in an hour. What surprised me about this incident was the amount of weight that dog had lost overnight. If I had not seen it with my own eyes I would not have believed it. I have lost dogs for six days before and they came back looking better than Buzz after one night. All I can figure is he must have been shivering intensely all night long or pacing in one spot but the healthy dog that left the truck came back a bag of bones the next day. It took him almost two weeks to recover even with a big pot of deer stew the wife made especially for him.

Bob McClellan from Fort Jones California has a new addition to the pack and he sent this along:

"Took my new huntin’ dawg out for his first "for real" hunt today. Took his Uncle Casey along too, just in case. LOL. It’s amazing how much snow is still left after all the rain we had last week. Still can’t get any farther with the pickup than I could the last time I tried it. Parked the truck and walked in to a couple of calling stands. The snow is soft now, and hard walking. At the first stand I set a Fox Pro electronic caller down behind some small logs in a cut over area, then backed off into some timber. Casey knows the routine by heart and laid down. I slipped a piece of binder twine through Bear’s collar to at least keep him near me. The words "Lay down and be still" are not part of his vocabulary yet! The sound of the caller several yards away were only a mild curiosity to the pup. He was more interested in trying to chew the cord in two. First time he has had a lead of any kind attached to his collar, and he wasn’t at all sure that he liked it. I let the caller play for a half hour and was about to give it up when a raven sailed in to check things out. This is usually a good sign, so I stuck it out another 10 minutes or so, but nothing else showed up.

Picked up the caller and walked back to the truck. We walked in to another place and repeated the setup, only this time I used a mouth blown call. It startled the pup at first, and he was trying to climb into my face to see what the heck it was. He soon calmed down, and for the rest of the stand was content to lay next to me with his head on my boot and catch a little nap.

BOB McCLELLAN'S "BEAR"

What surprised me was there was no howling as I had experienced with Casey, Kelly, and Sadie when I first blew a mouth call near them. Aside from being startled and curious, it didn’t seem to bother Bear at all. Called in a raven at this stand too, but that was all. I drove to another place and up a side road for about a quarter mile. I passed a vehicle were 3 people and a couple of dogs were walking around. Around the next corner I came to a spot where someone had recently dug their way out of a snow drift. I had done the same thing about a week ago and didn’t want to repeat the process. I put it in reverse and backed out of there. When I got to the parked vehicle, the people there were smiling. It was them who had been stuck. I drove to one more place to check out another road. Looks like I might possibly be able to drive up this one for a little way, but a down tree will have to be cut out of the way first. The forecast is WET for the next 5 days straight. Maybe it will melt off some of this white stuff!

Bob Mc"

Last March I mentioned Bryan Cummins' book "Airedales the Oorang story" which goes into great depth on the Oorang Kennel operation in LaRue Ohio run by Walter Lingo and if you care to look for it in a book store it is published by Detselig Enterprises Ltd. ISBN 1-55059-212-2.
I get many inquiries for an "Oorang type" or a "large Oorang" Airedale and I think the most important point to be made in the following article and Bryan's book is that there wasn't an oorang type. Lingo sold Oorang Airedales of all shapes and sizes and to quote from "Airedales the Oorang story" "In Oorang comments #25, page 81, it states unequivocally that "When full grown your Airedale dog will weigh from forty to fifty-five pounds and if a female will weigh slightly less. This is the standard weight, but when required, we can furnish over-sized Airedales whose weight will be from sixty to one hundred pounds."

The following then is "DOGDOM'S GREATEST SALES PITCH" by David Michael Duffey reprinted from OUTDOOR LIFE magazine Volume 168, Number 1, which summarizes quite nicely the oorang operation

How about an all-Indian football team as a sales gimmick for dogs? It may seem fantastic but it worked. Peak sales of Oorang Airedales came to $1 million a year. Strangely enough most of the dogs were worth the price.

An Oorang Airedale hotly pursuing a running bear was nothing out of the ordinary in 1923. Bringing bears to bay was one of many things expected of this strain of Airedale terrier, a breed President Teddy Roosevelt admired because "an Airedale can do anything any other dog can do and then whip him if he has to."
Fielding an all-Indian professional football team was one of many promotional brainstorms of a small-town, ex-Army captain, Walter H. Lingo, to call public attention to the Oorang strain of Airedales he was breeding.
So extensive and successful were Captain Lingo's efforts that even 60 years later Oorang is synonymous with hunting Airedales. Oorangs made the Airedale terrier breed extremely popular in the 1920's, but there is only one breed of Airedale terrier. The Oorang is only a strain developed by Lingo.
Before his "discovery" of the Airedale, Lingo was into trail hounds. During the time he developed and promoted his own strain of Airedale he also trained and sold "Oorang Hounds" to big-game hunters. He may well have been the originator of the common concept of having an Airedale or two in packs of. big-game hounds to fight bears and cougars

MISS BOX AN OLD STYLE AIREDALE

Public relations spectacular
Hiring Indian athletes to hunt, train, and give exhibitions with Oorang Airedales, when not playing pro football as the Oorang Indians, ranks Lingo as the best ever of canine merchandisers and promoters. Walter H Lingo has to rank as king of mail-order dog sales.
At nine years of age, Lingo concluded that advertising was the way to a pot of gold. When a bitch he owned whelped seven pups, he placed a 25c ad in a sporting journal and got a dozen cash-in-advance orders. It hurt to return the money for the unfilled orders. So Lingo determined to have dogs available to satisfy customer demand. During the peak of the Oorang promotional years his extensive operation had as many as 1,000 brood bitches producing 15,000 puppies a year. As many as 500 dogs were kenneled at the LaRue, Ohio, operations base.
But his Oorang studs were bred to bitches farmed out all over the country. Rural residents raised puppies like livestock. Adult dogs were loaned out to hunters, who gave them field experience and returned them to be sold,
Lingo kept track of his breeders and their offspring with a card-index system, and at one time had 40 clerks and record-keepers at the headquarters, in addition to trainers, kennel men, crate builders, and other employees. Questionnaires were filled out on all the farmed-out bitches so Lingo could try to ascertain the temperament and ability that might he passed on to pups. Because he tried to fill orders for everyone the Oorang strain size was never standardized. Airedales weighing from 40 to 100 pounds were produced. For the most part they ran to 50 pounds and 22 to 23 inches at the shoulder.
The above information and more to follow was furnished by OUTDOOR LIFE readers. In "Tough But Gentle" (OUTDOOR LIFE, January 1975) 1 discussed the potential of Airedales as sporting and companion dogs. I was curious to know more about the Oorang Airedales, and asked OUTDOOR LIFE readers for help. The response overwhelmed me.
Lingo's colorful activities may have been the first effort to sell dogs through promotional gimmicks, sales strategy, and mass production. It was successful. He is said to have sold $1 million worth of Oorangs in a single year.

Origin of the breed
Airedales got their start in the Aire River valley of Northern England as poaching and sporting dogs for working-class people. Presumably a variety of breeds, Otterhound, Old English Sheepdog; Border Terrier, Bullterrier, Greyhound, and Deerhound, contributed to their makeup. They were also called Waterside terriers, reflecting their use on streamside game such as otters, and Bingley terriers from a town in the Aire valley.
In 1881, the first Airedale, Bruce, to come to the United States won the terrier class in a New York show. Details about early English and U.S. champions and bloodlines can be found in The Airedale by William A. Bruette (Forest And Stream Publishing 1916) and The Complete Airedale Terrier by Gladys Brown Edwards (Howell Books 1966).
Upon hearing of the big terrier who could do hound and utility work, Lingo tried several show-bred strains but found them lacking in the scenting ability and stamina hunting dogs need. He got what he was looking for in Ch. Crompton Oorang.
From a long line of bench champions, Lingo produced King Oorang II who came to be touted as the world's outstanding utility dog. Precocious as a puppy, King learned to retrieve waterfowl and upland game, trail and tree raccoons, drive cattle and sheep, and hunt in hound packs for bears, 1ions, and wolves. Pitted against one of the best fighting bullterriers, King whipped and killed it. But he was extolled as friendly with people.
During World War I, King was trained in Red. Cross work and served bravely in France. Dogs were sent into the battlefield to locate wounded soldiers and carry first aid supplies. Other Airedales also won laurels for this work. Perhaps as a result, the Airedale is one of a few non-native breeds that is popular in Germany.
Making Oorang his trademark, Lingo pitched in with a flare to make the strain popular. The Oorang Indian football team was more colorful than successful; winning only three of 19 games in the two seasons it was in the NFL. But as dog trainers, the Indians traveled the country giving exhibitions that featured Oorangs trailing and treeing bears and tomahawk, knife, and lariat throwing, and firearms marksmanship by the Indians.
Just a generation removed from the Indian wars, many Indians who enlisted in World War I served as special scouts for the Army. Demonstrations of what the scouts and the Airedale guard and Red Cross dogs did during the war climaxed each performance.
Jim Thorpe (recognized as the outstanding athlete in the first half of the 2Oth century) was the most famous of the lndian~trainers working for Lingo. Thorpe was a near paragon in virtually every athletic endeavor. He played everything well, and he was an outstanding shot with rifle, shotgun, and pistol, an expert horseman and lariat thrower, and a tireless hunter.

MY TERRA

The Oorangs at home
By 1919 Thorpe was coaching and playing for the Canton (Ohio) Bulldogs, and when the National Football League was formed (actually called the American. Professional Football Association) in 1920 Thorpe was its first president. After he completed the 1921 season playing for Cleveland, Thorpe spent a week hunting with Lingo and the idea of an all-Indian grid team, sponsored by Oorang Kennels was conceived. Lingo's imagination invented a non-existent Indian tribe for whom the dogs and the team were named.
The Oorangs, quartered in a converted clubhouse south of LaRue on the banks of the Scioto River, had an unusual training schedule. Football practice was from 1 to 5 o'clock in the afternoon showers, rubdowns, and supper took up the next two hours. Then at7 o'clock they took off with the canine Oorangs on coon-hunting forays in the surrounding countryside, running and whooping until midnight.
The Oorang Airedales had staged encounters with wolves, foxes, coyotes, and bears at the La Rue training center. Lingo took animals in trade and used them to train his dogs.
Lingo was also quick to recognize the value of celebrity names in sales promotion. Among Oorang owners who testified to the strain's greatness were Baseball Hall of Farmer Ty Cobb, who as a Detroit Tiger set base-stealing and batting records and had a string of bird dogs in his Georgia kennel; Harry Carey, a cowboy movie star; Tris Speaker, manager .of the Celveland Indians baseball team; Nick Altrock, Washington Senator, baseball comedian, Louise Fazenda, .a movie star comedienne; Lt. John A. MacReady, pioneer aviator and holder of world aircraft records; and Harlin McCoy, a lad who won the, title of World's Champion Marbles Shooter. A young Airedale named Indian Oorang was presented to Tris Speaker in a home plate ceremony in Cleveland on Memorial Day 1922.
Less prominent people around the country were even more deeply involved with Oorangs. Sportsmen from Iowa, South Dakota, Minnesota, and Texas wrote me to relate how their fathers had trained or raised farmed out Oorangs and their personal experiences with the strain. Recalling his boyhood in LaRue from 1912 to 1928, when hundreds of dogs were being shipped monthly, another tells of going: to the railroad depot after school to see the crates of dogs stacked there and his astonishment at the declared values pasted on the crates-$35 to $50 for puppies and up to $500 for trained dogs. Dog farmers received $10 or$15 for pups returned to Lingo.
"Thoroughly trained" police, Red Cross, scout, and Army dogs were sold for $500; farm dogs "educated heel-drivers of cattle and sheep", $150; hunting dogs, "trained on bear, wolf, fox, deer, wildcat, lynx, coon, 'skunk, opossum, or mink", $150; water retrievers, "trained on duck, geese, rail, plover, and snipe", $150. In each category partly trained dogs sold for half the trained dog prices.
Then, as today, citizens were concerned with crime waves. Trained Oorang Airedale watchdogs and guards could be had for between $50 and $200. A three to five-year-old Oorang "bred from generations of champions that can win on the bench in the' fastest company; trail, tree, and fight all kinds of wild game; retrieve all kinds of waterfowl; stay with an automobile all day whether you are there or not; guard property; heel or charge on command and 'make good' at any task that can he performed by a dog" could be had for $500.

A critic speaks
Lingo's program has its critics. An officer of the Airedale Terrier Club of America wrote, "Mr. Lingo's primary purpose was making money and to do this he farmed out his bitches to farmers around the area, paying them a dollar more for raising puppies to nine or 10 weeks of age than they could get for raising a baby pig to the, same age. Hence, it paid a farmer to feed swill to the puppies. At peak operation he had approximately 2,000 bitches farmed out and around 1918 sold 26,000 Airedales. The market was ruined by 1926,and he had to destroy 12,000. He sold a lot of his puppies in pet shops.
"He also went in for training hunting packs and, as a result, raised hounds to round out the pack with Airedales. He had a bear at LaRue for teaching young hounds and Airedales to track. He'd muzzle and glove the bear and teach young Airedales to hold it on a dime. This way, when the hear hit the dogs with his paws he wouldn't tear them apart, just crack their ribs. They learned.

MY SON SLEDDING WITH GRIZZ & BAR

"He sold trained packs consisting of three hounds and two Airedales for $1,500, and the best bear packs were taken out West and trained on lions. A lion pack would sell for $5,000. Apparently, he averaged about three lion and 10 bear packs a year. He told me he knew what it was like to have half a million dollars in the bank and he also knew at a later date what poverty was like.
Whatever the reason, a glutted market, economics, costly promotion, or bad luck, the Oorang Kennels of LaRue, Ohio, went bankrupt three years before the stock market crashed in 1929. By that time Lingo had an oar in just about every aspect of dog business, equipment, his own brands of dog food, medicines, and shipping crates, and published both a dog and an all-sports magazine.
During the Depression years there was little demand for comparatively costly purebred dogs, although Oorangs were trained for hunting packs into the 1950s and Airedales, both of the hunting strain and from bench show stock, went to war again in 1941 in World War II's Dogs For Defense. Program. Lingo continued to sell Oorangs as the "Lingo. Rue Kennels" and through "Sportsmen's Service"' in the 1940s and 1950s. He died in January1967.
Attributing his success to the mail-order dog business to the Horatio Alger books he read as a boy, analysis of the best selling arguments in advertisements, and observing his father's general-store operation, Lingo never denied that money-making motivated much of his effort. But development of a useful dog was of at least equal concern to him.
Later other strains were developed within the Airedale terrier breed - Dalehaven, WarIand, Lionheart, Ouachita, and Lyons. They have Oorang blood in their backgrounds: The effect of Lingo's mass production and sales left an indelible mark on the breed, and on dog breeding and merchandising in general. But for all practical purposes what was perhaps the most famous line of dogs ever passed on with the death of its' shrewd and colorful originator in 1967.

Well that's it, the quote of the month is: "People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war or before an election." Otto Von Bismark

As Henry Johnson always said: "Until next month, let me hear from you Airedale people and don't forget to put your arms around those black and tan dogs with the beards and the moustaches and talk to them. They are people dogs and family members.
Respectfully submitted, Clint Stubbe, Northern Corresponding Secretary for the Working Airedale Terrier Association. No rules, regulations, officers, dues or formal affiliations. It's more a state of mind.