After we bought our first house together, Mitchell and I talked about getting a dog. We both had Boston Terriers as kids, but Mitchell was enamored of Boxers. Whenever we were out driving and would see one, he would insist on stopped to look at it and, if possible, to play with it. So we decided to get a Boxer.
We started looking at want-ads, found a breeder and when to check out a new litter. We picked out a young mail pup. We were scheduled to pick it up just before Christmas, so we planned that Phillip and I would pick the puppy up and Mitchell would pretend that it was a surprise Christmas present.
We picked up Butzer, took him to the vet for his shots, and presented him to Mitchell with a red bow around his neck. Later, I wrote a song about the event, "I Came Wrapped in a Christmas Bow."The name "Butzer" came from a pet name that Mitchell used for a variety of people and animals.
We were in the "train house" on Rosedale road then. We had a big back yard, a half-acre or more. We fenced it and installed a dog door for Butzer to use whenever he wanted. To use the dog door, Butzer had to go up a three-foot long ramp. It took a while to train him, with Phillip crawling up and down the ramp and through the dog door to demonstrate the procedure.
Butzer always went to the boat with this. The problem was he didn't like it much. He couldn't swim, and I had to rescue him from drowning once when he fell off the boat at Haven Harbor. Mitchell and I thought he may have suffered from motion sickness once we were underway. To be sure, he hated loud noises, such as the cannon that was fired on holiday weekends in St. Michael's and Annapolis. Whatever that would happen he would frantically try to escape from the boat, jumping on another one if it were handy, or sometimes going overboard.
I ran 5 miles every day, and Butzer always ran with me. On one occasion, when I was running through Bryn Mawr with Butzer, a Lower Merion Police car stopped and asked me if I knew the owner of a little boxer puppy he had in the front seat beside him. He explained that he had found the puppy running loose on Overbrook Parkway, a major thoroughfare defining the western city limits of Philadelphia. I didn't know the owner and so the police officer left. I told Mitchell about it. He said, “We have to adopt that puppy. They'll kill him if no one comes to claim him.” I hadn't thought about that, but I was opposed to having two boxers. Shortly thereafter I left on a trip to Kosovo, and Mitchell adopted the puppy while I was gone. We named him George, after Mitchell's childhood Boston terrier. When he first took him to the vet for shots, the veterinary staff did not record his name, and so when we got the records and the bill back, it showed “Newpup” in the name field. We thought that was a great name, and so our second boxer became “George Newpup.”
Butzer was more stolid than Newpup. Butzer would periodically forget how to use the dog door and we would have to show him how to do it all over again. Newpup never forgot, and was rambunctious in all matters. More than once, as we were taking both of them down the dock to the sailboat, Newpup got so frisky, dancing around, that he knocked Butzer off the edge of the dock with his rump.
