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The Digging Out of Nip
- University of Wisconsin Press
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73 l The Digging Out of Nip It’s funny how you find out about life. You pick up a lot from your mother, your dad, and your wife, of course. It’s their job to teach you things. But it pays to keep your eyes and ears open all the time. You learn some of the most important lessons by accident. For example, I learned about the value of friendship from the digging out of Nip on New Year’s Eve 1953. When we moved to Manitowoc in 1950, our nearest neighbors were forests and fields, a ravine and creek, a dairy farm, and Tony. Tony, his wife, Mildred, a springer spaniel named Mickey, and Tony’s pack of beagles lived next door. Tony and Mildred were the epitome of neighbors: friends who would give you their shirts in a pinch, and iron them first. The matriarch of Tony’s beagle pack was a little bitch named Susie, and sometime in 1951 a marriage was arranged between Susie 74 TheDiggingOutofNip and our beagle, Rip. The pick of the litter was a pup I called Nip, my personal beagle. Nip inherited Rip’s pedigreed looks and singing voice, and Susie’s vast reserves of face-licking affection and rabbit savvy. Besides Susie and her beagle clan, Tony had another great asset: the only television set in the neighborhood. Back in 1953, only two channels “came in” around Manitowoc, one from Green Bay and the other from Milwaukee. The programs weren’t much, as I remember: mostly Hopalong Cassidy, Howdy Doody, and wrestling. Even as a kid I thought Howdy Doody was pretty stupid, and it didn’t take long to get tired of watching Hoppy chase the same villains around the same twenty acres of Southern California. But the wrestling was just what the doctor ordered, a mild sedative for people who had put in a long day. There were no flashy costumes or shaggy haircuts. The wrestlers were big, tough Italians and Irishmen who wore high-top sneakers, skimpy little black underpants, and tattoos with simple messages like “USMC” and “Mother.” Each match was a melodrama of good versus evil with plenty of slapstick thrown in, an irresistible combination , and Dad and I didn’t resist. On wrestling nights, we were regulars in Tony’s TV den. Tony and Dad would sprawl in easy chairs while Mickey and I lay on the rug. Tony would put out a big bowl of Kraft caramels, and we’d eat them by the dozens while glued to the screen. During commercials Tony would pick the cellophane from five or six caramels, squeeze them into a ball, and toss them to Mickey. Dogs’ teeth are not made for eating caramels; it takes a dog quite a while to dispatch even one, and Mickey could make a half dozen last a good five minutes, drooling and wagging his stub of a tail while he took savage bites. Some nights, Mickey’s struggles with the caramels were better than the wrestling. [54.198.34.207] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 06:21 GMT) 75 It was on one of these wrestling nights that Tony suggested the final rabbit hunt of the year. “I want to get the beagles out one more time before it gets too damn cold,” Tony said to Dad. “Gotta work tomorrow morning, so how about tomorrow afternoon? It’s New Year’s Eve, but I’m not going anyplace.” As fifth-generation Methodists, our family never had plans for New Year’s Eve, and so the hunt was on. Saturday dawned cold and clear. By midmorning, a stiff northwest wind was shuffling the drifts of dry, fluffy snow in our yard. Dad muttered and scraped frost off the kitchen window to get a look at the thermometer. “Ten above,” he said, shaking his head. “Tony must be nuts.” I didn’t care how cold it was. After an hour of wheedling the night before, I’d convinced Dad to let Nip and me come along. We’d be serving only as observers; at eleven, I was too young to carry a gun, and Nip was still a half-grown pup with a high tenor voice. But we were finally going to go rabbit hunting with the grown-up men and the grown-up dogs! I was light-headed with impatience. Late that morning, mighty preparations began. Mom perked a pot of coffee and poured it into our fragile glass thermos...