by Susan Orlean
The Fred Finch Children’s Home was a Methodist institution, solid and earnest. Its founders were proud of the home’s cleanliness and order, especially compared to the dank, germy orphanages in bigger cities. An early brochure boasted that in its first five years of operation, not a single one of the Fred Finch children had died.
Like most orphanages of the time, Fred Finch was a refuge not just for the truly orphaned but also for children who needed care while their parents struggled through a period of adversity or until the children were fourteen years old, when state payments for their upkeep ended. The orphanage operated as a peculiar sort of pawnshop. Parents could reclaim their children when circumstances improved—unless, in the meantime, the children had been adopted by other couples, who could shop the orphanage inventory and ask to take a child home if one happened to catch their eye.
Elizabeth filled out an application to leave Lee and Marjorie at Fred Finch, answering the questions tersely:
Reputation and sobriety of parents? Good.
If either or both parents have deserted the child, state when.
Father deserted January 8, 1897.
Will the child inherit anything from its parents’ estate or
insurance? If so, how much? Nothing that I know of.
Is the father dead? I do not know.
The orphanage physician examined Lee and Marjorie, and then Elizabeth signed the papers and said goodbye. “How [Mother] kissed us, left us on the porch and walked down that long lane to the car line will be a picture I shall never forget,” Lee later wrote in his memoir. “The days that followed were very lonely and sad and when night came, it seemed as though my bed was falling into some dark well or canyon.”
Over the next three years, many people who visited Fred Finch looked at cute, curly-haired Marjorie and came close to adopting her, but only one family gave serious thought to adopting Lee, pausing to look him over as if he were a stray at an animal shelter. Then they decided that Lee’s ears were too big and moved on to examine other children.
Lee and Marjorie lived at the orphanage for three years. In the span of a child’s life, that’s a long time: Lee was six years old, a child, when he arrived and nine when he left, a real boy. He was never, technically, an orphan, since his mother was alive, but in a sense, he came of age in the orphanage. The experience shaped him; for the rest of his life, he was always deeply alone, always had the aloneness to retreat to, as if it were a room in his house. The only companion in his loneliness he would ever find would be his dog, and his attachment to animals grew to be deeper than his attachment to any person.
Surprisingly, once he left Fred Finch, Lee didn’t choose to forget the place and the years he lived there. He seemed to look on it not as a nightmare he had survived but as a sorrowful time that had been redeemed. When Rin Tin Tin was bringing him all the money and fame in the world, Lee took every opportunity to mention publicly that he had lived in an orphanage when he was young. He carried a copy of his Fred Finch admission papers with him at all times, till the day he died. When he did publicity tours with Rin Tin Tin, his first stop was always the local orphanage. This kind of visit was a convention for many public figures, but for Lee it was like going home. He visited Fred Finch often; he became a celebrity there. In 1934, the children at the home staged a play based on his life. After the performance, a staff member wrote to Lee, “Boys and girls are beginning to hold their heads a little higher—to say with a note of pride, ‘I came from the home, too—same home as Mr. Lee Duncan!’ You have raised us to a pedestal by your coming.”
Fred Finch is on the rise of a hill in Oakland, in the shadow of a huge Mormon temple, and is now called the Fred Finch Youth Center. One day not long ago, I stopped by hoping to visit the dormitory where Lee felt himself falling into a dark well. But most of what had existed when Lee and Marjorie lived there is gone: many of the original buildings burned down years ago, and others were torn down in the 1960s because they had gotten shabby. The new buildings are bland and boxy, the usual institutional structures, and the campus resembles a midpriced office park. The residence building, where the children lived, is now an administrative office; a bedroom that could have been Lee’s is now the accounting department. I strolled across the campus and then, at the last minute, ducked into another of the remaining original buildings. I wandered down a long corridor with glossy green walls and went around a corner. Hanging there, in front of me, was a large framed picture of Lee on one of his many visits to Fred Finch with Rin Tin Tin, smiling down at a crowd of eager little kids.
Was it by chance or by design or by some mix of the two that the fatherless and motherless were drawn to Rin Tin Tin? Lee never knew his father, and had no parents at all for three critical years of his life. Bert Leonard had the edgy, fists-up manner of a stray, and he had only a passing relationship with his father, who always managed to be missing when Bert needed him. Daphne Hereford was abandoned by her mother; she was raised by her grandmother and spent most of her time with her grandmother’s dogs. Rin Tin Tin came to be loved by millions of people around the world. Many of them had intact families and no hole in their happiness. But he meant something special to people who had a persistent absence in their lives: he was, ultimately, the true companion for the companionless.
3.
In 1901, Elizabeth reconciled with her parents. At the time, they were managing a ranch outside San Diego, and they offered to take her and the children in. On that news, Elizabeth went to Fred Finch to reclaim Lee and Marjorie, who had spent their years at the orphanage not knowing whether that day would ever come. Elizabeth bundled the children onto the train and headed south.
“Then came the ride back to the country, the life I love best of all,” Lee wrote. In a single day, he was whisked from Fred Finch, where he lived in close quarters with three hundred children, to a ranch where the closest neighbors lived nine miles away. Lee’s only friend there was a stick horse he rode day and night. His grandfather had several dogs, but Lee wasn’t permitted to even touch them, let alone treat them as companions. They were ranch dogs, used to herd livestock, and his grandfather, a severe and unyielding figure, told Lee their training would be ruined if he played with them. Lee was only allowed to “admire them from a distance.”
Eventually Lee was given a lamb as a pet. He adored the lamb, taught him tricks, took him everywhere—he even slept with the lamb, whenever he managed to sneak him into the house. One day, when Lee wasn’t paying attention, the lamb ate Lee’s grandfather’s favorite rose bush. The man was enraged. He had the lamb slaughtered. “It was then that he killed something inside of me,” Lee wrote in his memoir. “It took many years to outgrow that hurt.”
Several years later, Lee finally got his first dog, a little terrier he named Jack. He quickly discovered the pleasure of training him, and the two of them spent hours together every day in a corral behind the house, practicing their routine. Lee realized, right away, that he had a talent for it. He always attributed his talent more to diligence than to genius, more to patience and practice than to anything else, but he knew that he had a special capacity for working with dogs.
One day, Elizabeth announced that she and the children were leaving the ranch. It is unclear what prompted the decision, but she took Lee and Marjorie to Los Angeles and moved in with an uncle of Grant Duncan’s—the husband who had deserted her—which suggests that she might have fallen out with her parents. She told Lee they would have to leave his dog, Jack, behind until they had settled in but promised they would send for him as soon as they could. Lee was physically sick with longing for the dog and spent ten days in bed. Elizabeth finally told him that Jack would never be joining them. He had been given to some friends of hers; she told Lee she had decided it was best if he didn’t visit him. Losing Jack was one of the worst experiences of his life, but Lee promised his mother he would put it out of his mind. “From that time on,” he declared, “Jack was just a memory.” He never saw Jack again.
Elizabeth
eventually married a man named Oscar Sampson, and the family moved from Los Angeles to Burbank, probably into Sampson’s home. Lee lived with his mother and sister well into adulthood and wrote extensively in his memoir about their life together, but he never once mentioned Sampson. He also never mentioned that Elizabeth and Oscar Sampson had a daughter. It was as if Lee was determined to stay orphaned forever—as if he was more comfortable with, or at least accustomed to, being a solitary, fatherless boy.
He found his pleasure everywhere other than with people. He loved being alone, outside. One of Elizabeth’s cousins was the foreman of a colossal 350,000-acre ranch near Los Angeles, and Lee went there as often as he could, spending days in the wilderness alone, fishing and hunting and hiking. During high school he got a job in the gun department at Bernal Dyas Sporting Goods, and after he dropped out of school he worked at the store full-time. He had no particular idea of what he would do with himself, but he knew he wanted to work outdoors. He thought about becoming a forest ranger or a fire lookout, and he wanted to learn how to fly a plane because he thought it might advance either of those plans.
Whatever reason Elizabeth had for getting rid of Jack seems to have evaporated by this time, and Lee got a new dog, which he named Firefly. This wasn’t another mongrel ranch dog like Jack: Firefly was a purebred Airedale, with a star-studded pedigree. Owning a purebred dog in the early 1900s was unusual, and the showing and breeding of pedigree dogs was an upper-class sport, nearly as exclusive as racehorse breeding. For a lower-middle-class kid like Lee, it was a surprising pursuit. He started taking Firefly to dog shows, and once the dog became a champion, Lee started breeding her and selling the puppies. He was devoted to the dog. When he joined the army in 1917, hoping he would get free flying lessons out of it, he left Firefly behind with great regret.
The first Americans in World War I were rich, educated pilots who signed up even before the United States officially joined the Allied effort. Most of them flew with a French squadron called Lafayette Escadrille. The squadron was a stylish outfit that had a pair of lion cubs named Whiskey and Soda as its mascots. The pilots often brought Whiskey and Soda along when they flew sorties. There were other squadron pets, too. Blair Thaw, heir to a train and boat fortune, never took off without his big Irish terrier on board and loved to demonstrate how he had trained the dog to refuse food if Thaw told him that the kaiser had sent it. Blair’s brother William, who was the first American to fly a mission in the war, usually had his pet skunk in the copilot’s seat.
In spite of their antics, the Lafayette Escadrille pilots were capable and accomplished; they flew scores of successful missions and amassed dozens of medals, including the Croix de Guerre. They were also killed at a staggering rate. But they projected something dashing and indomitable, and they became popular subjects of the short, biweekly newsreels that were shown in theaters before featured films. The pilots’ animals were ideal sidekicks, making the whole thing appear casual, almost sporting—as if aerial combat were a prelude to a good game of fetch. Even when the news from Europe was discouraging, a newsreel featuring a handsome young man skimming through the sky with a round-eyed lion cub beside him in the cockpit made the grim war almost seem gay.
The newsreels, with their jazzy, insouciant tone, must have tantalized kids like Lee Duncan, who had never seen anything so glamorous. When the United States finally entered the war, these were the kids who fumbled their way into the armed forces right out of high school or off the farm, and rode slow boats across the ocean to watch the world being harshly remade.
4.
At the time, the United States had fewer than two hundred thousand battle-ready troops, so training for newly enlisted men like Lee was hasty. He went through a two-week boot camp in Texas. Then, along with several thousand recruits and several hundred horses, he shipped out to Europe on a slow-moving decommissioned British troop carrier. The crossing to Europe was seventeen days of rough seas. Most of the men were desperately seasick. Three died of disease. Lee’s most vivid recollection of the trip, though, was of the terrible noise made by the horses, miserable and sick in their stalls below decks.
They landed at Glasgow and were then loaded on a train for England. At first, Lee was utterly lost. In his memoir, he gamely described the experience as interesting. “Even the food is novel,” he wrote, noting that it was the first time he had ever drunk tea or been served rabbit with its ears still attached. Everything in England astonished him. When I first read his memoir, I was surprised by how surprised he was, until I remembered that in 1917 most Americans had no idea what other countries looked like—and similarly, most Europeans had never seen the United States.
Lee was assigned to the 135th Aero Squadron. He was a low-ranking gunnery corporal, although in time, his Hollywood biography and his own gentle embellishments made him out to be an officer—sometimes a lieutenant, often a captain—or an aviator. His squadron had nineteen soldiers and a plane called What the Hell Bill. The troops believed that What the Hell Bill was a lucky charm, although, as it turned out, this was hardly true: most of the squadron’s officers were eventually killed in combat. Lee had enlisted hoping to fly, but he was earthbound. Thanks to his job at Bernal Dyas, he was a crack gun mechanic, so he was assigned to service the artillery. For weeks after arriving in England, the squadron was on hold, waiting for their orders to head to the front. On furloughs, Lee didn’t explore London or flirt with local girls; he spent his time traveling around the English countryside, looking for a well-bred dog to bring home.
The countryside, though, was quiet; all the dogs were gone. Lee later learned that because of food shortages, many people had gotten rid of their pets, and many others had donated their dogs to the British Army to use in the war.
It is estimated that 16 million animals were deployed in World War I. Their presence alongside the equipment of warfare suggests a surreal fusion of clumsy antiquity and vicious modernity. Many species were involved. Britain’s Imperial Camel Corps boasted thousands of ill-tempered camels. The cavalry used close to a million riding horses. Heavy draft horses pulled artillery and guns. Thousands of mules drew carts or packed loads. Hundreds of thousands of homing pigeons carried messages. Oxen dragged the heaviest equipment wagons. Dogs were everywhere. Germany, where the first military dog training school in the world was established in 1884, had 30,000 dogs on active duty, and the British and French armies had at least 20,000, of which 7,000 were pets donated by private citizens. (If a dog was deemed a washout in training, the British put a tag around its neck saying USELESS. Most of these dogs were taken out and shot.) In fact, every country in the war used dogs except for the United States. By the time the U.S. military came to appreciate their value, it was too late to develop an American canine corps, so when necessary, the United States borrowed dogs from the French and British armies.
Dogs worked in every imaginable capacity, and some that were unimaginable. Many served as messengers, carrying notes between troops across contested ground. It was a dangerous job that was assigned to the lowest-ranked soldiers if no dogs were available. (Adolf Hitler was a messenger in the kaiser’s army.) Red Cross dogs, also known as “sanitary” or “mercy” dogs, worked in the field after battles ended, roaming among the casualties with saddlebags of medical supplies. If a soldier was injured but conscious, he could call a dog over and help himself to bandages or water; if he was mortally wounded, he could embrace the dog for comfort while he died. Other dogs were trained to assist medics. Once fighting stopped, these animals, known as cadaver dogs, were sent out to survey the field. Dogs can distinguish by scent whether someone is alive or dead, and the cadaver dogs were taught to indicate, by barking or pulling a piece of a soldier’s clothing, which bodies on a battlefield still had life in them. When there were hundreds or thousands of bodies littered on a field, the dogs’ survey saved the medics a great deal of time.
Every type of dog had a role. Big dogs pulled ordnance and ammunition on carts; little dogs—“ratters”—c
leared rodents out of the trenches. Aggressive dogs were used as sentries and on patrol. The unluckiest dogs were called “demolition wolves”—they were suicide bombers, released into enemy territory with explosives strapped to their bodies. Probably the most warmly welcomed were the cigarette dogs: terriers that carried saddlebags full of cigarettes, which they were trained to distribute among the troops.
The British Army’s official dog was the Airedale, tall and agile, useful in nearly every capacity; in England there had been a call to the public to donate their Airedales to the army, which is why Lee couldn’t find one to bring home. The Belgian army had several breeds of huge working dogs. Accustomed to pulling milk carts in peacetime, these dogs were easily reassigned to haul machine guns during the war. Sled dogs, retrievers, collies, and bulldogs were also used. Mixed breeds, if they were strong and smart—and preferably dark-colored, so they were harder to spot at night—were put to work. Any dog, as long as it was not shy or stupid, had a chance to take part in the war.