Buddy
Morris Frank lost the sight in his right eye when he hit an overhanging tree branch at the age of six while riding a horse, ten years later a boxing accident caused him to lose the sight in his right eye. Until he lost his own sight he had been the guide for his mother, who was blind. His family’s wealth allowed him to hire guides to assist him when he began working as an insurance salesman, but he found them to be unsatisfactory.
In 1927 Frank learned of a school in Switzerland where wounded World War I veterans, many of whom had been blinded by gas attacks on the Western Front, were being trained to use guide dogs. Frank contacted the Saturday Evening Post, which had published an article on the school, and after learning of its validity made arrangements to attend the school, which was called Fortunate Fields, run by an American trainer named Dorothy Harrison Eustis.
Frank was coupled with Kiss, a German Shepherd which he renamed Buddy, and after training with another American trainer, Jack Humphrey, returned to the United States in June 1928, with Buddy and Humphrey accompanying him. Frank arranged for Buddy to be observed by New York reporters as he put the dog through his paces guiding him through the heavy traffic, which in those days included automobile, streetcar, horse drawn wagons and carts, bicycles, and of course pedestrians.
Buddy was made famous almost overnight, the first such “seeing-eye dog” in the United States. Frank and Eustis established The Seeing Eye in Nashville in 1929, moving it to Whippany New Jersey in 1931, and finally to Morristown, NJ in 1965. It was the first guide dog school in the United States. All who were sighted were not enamored with the idea of sharing space until then prohibited to dogs. Frank, needing Buddy’s behavior to be perfect, faced the task of convincing the public that guide dogs were acceptable.
In 1928 no railroad allowed dogs in the passenger cars, by 1935 all railroads allowed guide dogs, after observance of the behavior and deportment Buddy displayed. Buddy did a similar job with hotels and other places of business, including banks. When Buddy died in 1938, Frank replaced him with another Shepherd, also named Buddy, to continue his work. The service dogs prevalent today, welcomed virtually everywhere, are Buddy’s legacy.