Owney Travels Again

Every other year the National Federation of Post Office Clerks holds a convention to discuss ways & means of solving the greatest human problem: how to get more money for less work. Next week the union will convene in Toledo, Ohio. Present, besides delegates from 2,600 locals, will be Postmaster General James Aloysius Farley, Governors Davey of Ohio and Murphy of Michigan. Dignitaries though they are, it is doubtful whether they will be able to steal the limelight from a mongrel dog, 40 years dead.

One day in 1888, a wistful little cur with a happy wag to his tail wandered into the Albany, N. Y. post office and made himself at home. Amused clerks promptly adopted him, named him Owney, fed him from their own lunches, let him sleep on mail sacks. Feeling safe wherever there was mail, Owney took to climbing onto trains with it and traveling off to other cities, always returning, however, to Albany. The Albany clerks eventually bought him a collar, stamped on it a request that post office clerks elsewhere attach to it the names of the offices Owney visited. When the collar became too heavy for Owney, the Albany clerks replaced it with a harness. He became a legend in post offices all over the U. S.

In 1895, returning from a trip to Alaska, Owney trotted up the gangplank of the steamship Victoria, bound for Japan. There, the Emperor decorated him with a medal. Owney continued around the world by way of the Suez Canal and the Azores. All along the way he was met by bigwigs who awarded him medals. In Manhattan he remained only a few hours before he was whisked onto a westbound mail car. When he arrived in Tacoma, Wash., Owney had traveled round the world in 132 days. So in San Francisco, when he somehow got into a bench show with a houseful of snooty thoroughbreds, he was awarded another medal and a ribbon--for being the most traveled dog in the world.

As he grew older, Owney became irritable and testy. The Post Office Department frowned on him. But in spite of official displeasure Owney's friends, the clerks, kept him traveling. Owney came to the end of his journeys in Toledo. He bit a post-office clerk, and on June 12, 1897, he was shot. But such was Owney's fame that he was stuffed and placed in a glass case in the Smithsonian Institution. For 40 years Owney sat in his niche in the Smithsonian, awaiting a successor. It is now fairly certain there will never be another quite like him. Owney is a Post Office tradition.

Next week, as "a gracious link with the tradition of the old service," Owney, having traveled for the first time in 40 years, will sit in state in the lobby of the Commodore Perry Hotel in Toledo, to greet the successors of his longtime friends and protectors.

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