Jim the Wonder Dog
Somehow Jim the Wonder Dog became one of those books for the Coctails.
I associate it with Leo Wetherill from the Human Observation Lab in Kansas City. By this point the Human Observation Lab itself had long since closed, but Leo was still around, and I have a vague memory of him talking to us about Jim the Wonder Dog at one of our shows in Columbia, Missouri. I can’t remember whether Leo gave us copies, or just told us about it and sent us looking for it. I also can’t really remember what Leo’s take on the story was—whether he thought there was something genuinely mysterious about Jim or whether he just loved it as this strange piece of Missouri folklore.
But somehow the book stuck. I know John has a copy, and I think most, if not all, of us ended up with one.
The book itself is from 1942 and tells the story of Jim, a Missouri hunting dog who supposedly had all kinds of inexplicable abilities. It’s written in this very folky way, and I need to go back and read it again because I don’t remember much more than that right now.
What interests me about it now is the mythology of it. Jim was a real dog, real things happened around him, and then over time those things became stories, and the stories became the thing people remembered. That feels strangely connected to what I’m doing with the Coctails archive now. I’m looking back at things that happened more than thirty years ago and realizing that some of what I remember is the event itself, some of it is the story we told about the event, and sometimes I’m no longer completely sure where one ends and the other begins.
For now, Jim the Wonder Dog can just sit here as one of those strange little objects that somehow became part of the Coctails world.
