Nice that he still has a Yorkie...
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Monday afternoon, 82-year-old Bill Wynne will take the pitcher's mound to throw the first ball to a catcher behind home plate when the Eastlake Captains play the Greensboro Bats out in the eastern suburbs of Cleveland.
More important, Wynne's Yorkie, Habie, will be on the mound with him. Monday will be doggie day at the ballpark, a promotion for the Captains, a minor league franchise of the Cleveland Indians.
Wynne, whose wife, Margaret, died May 7 after a long illness, lives on Harlan Road not far from Charles Mill Lake. But most of his life was spent in Cleveland, where he had two careers.
The lesser known one was doing some high-flying photography work for NASA. It was a continuation of his aerial photography work in the South Pacific during World War II.
The other was 10 years of show business with his talented Yorkshire terrier, Smoky.
Bill and Smoky appeared often on Cleveland's Channel 3 in a show called "Castles in the Air.'' Smoky could do a million tricks, like wire walking. She was a dog with charisma.
She also was a war hero. "Yank,'' the service magazine, once featured Smoky on its cover. She was sitting in an upturned steel pot and the magazine called her "the best mascot in the South Pacific'' and "World War II's tiny heroine.''
Wynne said another soldier in his unit found the tiny terrier in a foxhole in the New Guinea jungles. How she got there is anyone's guess. But she was starving.
"The guy who found her really didn't like dogs all that much. He needed money to stay in a poker game so I bought her from him for two Australian pounds,'' Wynne said.
Smoky, as the tiny terrier came to be know, was a super-talented critter and a much-loved mascot for Wynne's unit, an Army Air Force photo reconnaissance squadron. She entertained wounded troops in hospitals. "She was one of the first therapy dogs on record,'' he said.
Wynne said Smoky's great service was in pulling a string through a long and small drain pipe under a busy fighter plane airfield that allowed a communications line to be set up under the field without ever disrupting traffic on the field.
"Only a tiny and rather courageous dog could have done it,'' he said.
Smoky died in 1957 after an incredibly useful life. Only recently did Wynne come up with another Yorkie. She is called Habie, which means "sweetheart'' in Arabic, he said.
The big event at Eastlake on Monday honors dogs and was set up by Jim Strand, a former Marine Corps helicopter pilot who served in Vietnam. Everyone who brings a dog to the park for Doggie Day will pay $3, and the money will go to the local humane society.
Dick Goddard, Cleveland's television weatherman icon, will sing the national anthem. He and Wynne will lead a doggie parade around the park.
Eastlake happens to be the home of Doggie Park. There are memorials honoring police, rescue and search dogs and a special monument honoring Smoky, World War II's littlest soldier and most famous war dog. There is a small photo of Smoky on this granite monument.
Wynne said there is also a plan to create a small bronze statue of Smoky to be included in a veterans' memorial in the Rocky River Reservation on the other side of Cleveland.
What a dog that Smoky was.
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