“Let me tell you a quick story about this old dog here,” says Bob McCoy, pointing to a portrait of a handsome black-and-white dog on the wall of Petaluma’s Buckhorn Tavern. McCoy owns the iconic Petaluma Blvd. bar, first owned by his father. The walls of the place are abundantly festooned with artwork, photos, mounted deer heads - and that eye-catching picture of an old, smiling dog.
“That’s a dog that my step-brother had,” explains McCoy. “My step-brother was a couple of years younger than I was, and he had a paper route. He got enough money together to buy this dog. At that time, there was a pet store just up the street from Andresen’s, so that’s where he bought it. He was just a mutt. My step-brother paid eight or ten dollars for the dog, something like that, and he named him Snuffy Smith, after the cartoon character. So what happened was, the dog, when he got a little bigger, he started following my step-brother on his paper route.”
Snuffy, McCoy explains, never had a leash, though he did wear a dog tag with his name.
“Eventually, my brother quit the paper route,” McCoy tells it, “but Snuffy Smith didn’t quit. He had a route, and he kept it up every day, all through the downtown. He had bars and shops that he’d go into, and he’d sit behind the people he knew until they noticed him. If you didn’t notice him, he’d growl. And if you didn’t hear that, he’d bark.”
People would turn and say, ‘Oh! Snuffy!’ And they’d give him a piece of jerky or whatever they had handy.
“And that’s what Snuffy did, at all the different places he went into,” McCoy smiles. “Eventually, he decided to follow the mailman on his route, too. When the mailman came by our house, the dog?would just take off on the route with him, and stick with him all the way, till the mailman finally went back to the Post Office.”
After that, though, Snuffy rarely went home. Not right away.
“He’d stay out in front of the Post Office until he spotted a customer’s car that he recognized, and he’d run alongside of it and he’d bark,” says McCoy. “When they saw him, they’d stop and open the back door to let him in, because they knew he wanted a ride back to the bar. That’s how Snuffy did things.”
It’s an old memory, but one that McCoy has clearly shared a thousand times.
“It was forty years ago, something like that,” he acknowledges, adding that Snuffy Smith lived a long, full life of a dog that was well known and (mostly) well-loved.
“He went through a lot, that dog,” McCoy nods. “He had a hernia once. He got run over and broke his leg. I remember one time, I came home from the service on leave, and I’d been up all night on the bus, but I heard this sound outside the window of the house. I went outside and Snuffy was there, stiff as a board. Someone had fed him poisoned meat, and he we got him to the vet … just in time. He was like a cat, that dog. He had nine lives.”
Glancing up at the painting, McCoy’s smile fades a bit.
“I remember the day he finally had to be put down,” he says, concluding the tale where all stories of beloved pets eventually end. “He was old, and it was my turn, so I took him in. We got skunked that day, my dad and I. Letting Snuffy go was not easy. He was such a dog, Snuffy was.”
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