My favorite dog this week is the Norfolk Terrier. We’ve had one, off and on, since Christmas at the doggie daycare.
Norfolk and Norwich Terriers are the smallest of the terriers. In their working life they are ratters, but because they’re the size of a small cat, they are also very popular companions.
The Norfolk Terriers have lop ears:
The Norwich Terriers have pointy ears:
Both breeds seem to have been developed in the mid-1800s in England. They were especially popular in the 1880s at Cambridge University where they were needed both as ratters and as companions.
Fun facts about Norwich and Norfolk Terriers include the claim that they can run eight miles per hour. (The fastest human being, Usain Bolt, has been clocked at 27.5 mph, but the average human runs just over five mph). Even though these terriers generally weigh eleven pounds or less, they are not considered toy dogs, as they were not an existing breed that was later bred to be small. They are simply a small breed.
This week I took Bonz (and my sister) to Chautauqua Park to see the bears. Remember when there were all those fiberglass cows in downtown Chicago? All painted by different people? Well, at Chautauqua Park they had fiberglass bears painted by different people, which they auctioned off this past Sunday as a fund-raiser.
These fund-raisers began in Zurich, Switzerland in 1986. They had fiberglass lions. The winged lion of St. Mark is the city symbol of Zurich, Bern, and Venice, and a remnant of a trade agreement between the three cities from 1615 that allowed any of those cities to call on the Swiss Guards to defend shipments of goods.
Chicago was the second city to hold a fiberglass animal fund-raiser - in 1999. In 2017, Chicago had fiberglass German Shepherds - in the K9’s for Cops fund-raiser.
But back to the bears. Chautauqua Park, in Boulder, was established in 1898, part of the nationwide Chautauqua Movement which sought to bring “a college outlook” to working- and middle-class Americans. There were educational programs and cultural programs in the Chautauqua Movement. Eulalie McKechnie Shinn’s “One Grecian Urn” scene in The Music Man is a parody of a Chautauqua program.
According to Chautauqua Park’s website:
“At the height of the Chautauqua Movement, around 1915, some 12,000 communities had hosted a chautauqua. Many of the lecturers and performers were contracted by chautauqua agencies, the most notable of which was the Redpath Agency in Iowa. The quality of the offerings varied from Vassar-educated lecturers and Shakespeare to animal acts and vaudeville farce.
The Chautauqua movement nearly died in the mid-1930s. Most historians cite the rise of car culture, radio, and movies as the causes, but there were several other important yet subtle reasons for the decline. One reason was the sharp increase in fundamentalism and evangelical Christianity in the 1920s; the bland, non-denominationalism exhibited at most chautauquas couldn’t accommodate these impulses.”
My sister and Bonz and I drove up to Chautauqua on Saturday. We parked quite a distance away and hiked in. When we got within about fifteen yards of the bears, Bonz suddenly started growling. He refused to move forward. It became clear that he was concerned about the fiberglass bears.
Eventually, my sister had to go up to the fiberglass bears and pet them and demonstrate to Bonz that they were friendly. Finally he slunk carefully up to one. Once he sniffed the first bear he realized that they were fiberglass, and it was as if he just rolled his eyes and said, “Oh. Whatever.” He wanted to go on with the hiking. Which, of course, we did. We walked to all the bears in the park, and then took a hike up to where we could look out over Boulder.
We’re continuing with our amazing aroma-by-aroma soap sale this week. The aroma of the week is Nostalgia. This is the soap that’s scented with a reverse engineered fragrance of the original Herbal Essence Shampoo. I was obsessed with that shampoo as a high school student. It was made for flower children. Here's a link that will take you directly to the sale Nostalgia bars: https://www.serenasoaps.com/product-page/nostalgia-bath-bar-2-75-3-25-oz
