Sergeant Stubby

by Ann Bausum

  Conroy’s career, as with his family life, took multiple and sporadically documented turns. His stint on Capitol Hill came to an end around 1928. Meanwhile, over a seven-year span starting in 1925, he made repeated attempts to return to the Bureau of Investigation as a special agent. Clearly his earlier post had meant a great deal to him, even though it had only lasted for a brief time. On four occasions—1925, 1928, 1931, and 1932—he sought to reenter the force. Some of the paperwork is missing from his FBI personnel file, but it’s clear from the evaluation that accompanied his 1928 application that his truncated marriage weighed heavily against him in the consideration.

  “Not qualified,” reads the boldly scribbled notation on one key document. The initials J.E.H.—J. Edgar Hoover—follow. Hoover’s broad strokes highlight the marriage and a few critical comments that accompany multiple testimonials to Conroy’s upstanding character. Childhood friends. Prewar employers. Commanding Army officers. Congressman Fenn. Acquaintances from work. Accomplished veterans. None of those mattered on Hoover’s scale of conduct. Neither did letters of support in 1931 and 1932 from such figures as Senator Hiram Bingham of Connecticut, other members of Congress, and the secretary to the U.S. President. “Beyond the age limit,” reads one notation in the file concerning a 1931 query, the year Conroy turned 39.

  So Conroy set aside his dreams of returning to the Bureau and pursued other lines of work. Certainly he practiced the law. He may have worked in the defense industry, as well. The Great Depression had begun following the 1929 crash of the stock market, and Conroy navigated its economic hardships along with the rest of the nation. He spent some of the following decades in Washington, D.C., working for the Veterans of Foreign Wars as a legislative officer, for example, but he lived elsewhere, too, including Boston and outside of Baltimore.

  When World War I veterans joined the ranks of those hardest hit by the Depression, their thoughts returned to their postwar bonuses. By 1932, plenty of families were so impoverished that it no longer seemed practical to wait for their bonus life insurance policies to mature in 1945. The down-on-their-luck veterans organized what they called the Bonus Army and the Bonus Expeditionary Force, playing off the name of the A.E.F., and in June they descended on Washington by the thousands with this plea: Pay our bonuses now.

  To emphasize their determination, some 25,000 veterans and their family members set up an encampment on public land. It seems unlikely that Conroy would have joined such an act of civil disobedience, but he must have understood the desperation felt by his fellow doughboys. The federal government did not, however. A month after the occupation began, President Herbert Hoover ordered the U.S. Army to clear the shantytown. Fellow Great War soldiers Douglas MacArthur and George S. Patton were among the officers who matter-of-factly routed the squatters using bayonets, tear gas, and tanks. Then the troops burned the settlement to the ground. (Two infants died in the attack from the effects of the tear gas.)

  Discouraged but not defeated, the veterans returned to the nation’s capital the next year, hoping for a better reception from a new President, Franklin D. Roosevelt. No one threatened the protesters with bayonets this time, but their appeals still went unanswered. The impoverished veterans persisted annually in their plea until it was finally granted in June 1936, with a Congressional override of a Roosevelt veto. The long-sought bonuses amounted to about $550 per veteran, or just over $9,000 today when adjusted for inflation. They could be completely cashed, partially liquidated, or allowed to mature until 1945, collecting 3 percent interest. Most veterans elected for immediate payment, and the resulting infusion of cash served as an inadvertent and valuable source of Depression-era economic stimulus.

  Perhaps Conroy collected some of his bonus and used it to fund his 1937 trip to Europe, returning home this time not on a troop transport ship but on the Queen Mary. If the 45-year-old veteran returned to visit battlefronts of the Great War, he brought back no surviving souvenirs. By 1937, not even two decades had passed since the end of the First World War, and yet in just two more years the next world war would begin. After the United States joined the conflict in 1941, Conroy and his brother, Hugh, both reported for duty. Family lore says that Robert Conroy served a role with military intelligence during this conflict, too, working stateside this time, but details are thin.

  As the years unfolded, how often did the aging doughboy drop by the Red Cross Museum in Washington, D.C., and, later, the Arts and Industries Building at the Smithsonian to visit his old friend? Curtis Deane has youthful memories of being taken to the latter site by his grandfather to see the famed mascot. “He was very proud of Stubby,” recalls Deane, noting that a Smithsonian staffer joined them for lunch as part of their visit.

  Eventually Conroy retired to Palm Beach, Florida, as did his twin sisters. Their brother and elder sister Alice were frequent visitors. (Their oldest sister, Margaret, had died in 1957; Conroy outlived all his siblings except Alice, who died within three months of his passing.) Always the networker, even in retirement, Conroy kept in touch with aging veterans from World War I, and he joined the social club of the many former FBI agents who retired to south Florida. Conroy held sway in Palm Beach as a sort of de facto mayor, according to his eldest grandson. “He was a gentleman 20 ways to Sunday,” Curtis Deane recalls, and had “a keen sense of humor.” Deane notes that his grandfather “vehemently opposed discrimination,” and he helped to break down local racial and anti-Semitic barriers. Although the aging veteran could still drive, he preferred to tour town by bicycle.

  Six decades elapsed after Stubby’s death, and yet Conroy never again owned another dog. Two wives, yes. But only one dog.

  In the spring of 1987, at age 95, Conroy had a fall that landed him in the hospital. The accident coincided with one of Curtis Deane’s annual spring visits. Deane learned about the injury only after his arrival, and he spent his vacation visiting the family patriarch at the hospital. He bid his grandfather farewell on April 25, 1987, and flew back to his home in New York. “I just knew I’d never see him again,” he recalls. No sooner had he reached home than the news arrived of his grandfather’s passing. Sixty-one years after Stubby’s death, Conroy, too, had gone west.

  “He was a proud man with a lot of dignity,” recalls his grandson. Conroy hadn’t spent time in a hospital since his 1919 stay in Paris for the flu, and he didn’t want to languish in one at the end of his life. Deane believes his grandfather held on so that the two of them could be together one last time. According to the story shared by Conroy’s second wife, her husband turned to her on that spring day, soon after his grandson’s departure, and said, “Margaret, I’ve had enough. This is it. I love you very much. Goodbye.”

  Then the old warrior closed his eyes and died.

  AFTERWORD

  “WE INHERITED THIS STORY,” EXPLAINS ALEXANDRA Deane Thornton, Robert Conroy’s youngest grandchild and only granddaughter. Imagine that. Imagine growing up with Stubby, the iconic hero of World War I, as a chapter in your own family’s history. He’s not just a quirky figure you hear about once and forget. Instead of being a celebrity, he’s one of your own. He’s a mascot that a consoling veteran recollects at your grandfather’s funeral. He’s a story you tell to your own children, your nieces, your nephews. He’s a topic you share with friends and a link to your personal past. He’s the reason your grandfather left you that blue Samsonite suitcase, the contents of which you’ve gathered to review with fresh eyes and an interested author.

  It takes a while to even find the material, long-since transferred to a storage carton. When we do, we unearth the treasures Conroy didn’t give to the Smithsonian, the few links to his old friend that he saved to his life’s end. Unpublished photos, including an unexpected image from 1917 taken at Yale before Conroy and Stubby shipped out for France. Conroy’s official military discharge form, which answers key questions about his wartime chronology. The only surviving print I’ve seen of a frequently published publicity photo where Stubby stands balanced on a chai
r, front feet raised on its back rails, so that his jacket can be seen in overview.

  We find confirmation that in 1933, seven years after Stubby’s death, Conroy received a Purple Heart in delayed recognition for having been wounded during the First World War. (Other meritorious Great War veterans received the same honor about this time, too, as part of a celebration commemorating the bicentennial of George Washington’s birth.) This military decoration with all likelihood corresponds to the one now pinned to Stubby’s jacket, adding weight to the theory that many of the medals attributed to the mascot were actually earned by Robert Conroy himself.

  The family history box yields other treasures and clues, as well. We find a Yankee Division beret that Conroy must have worn during veterans’ parades, and evidence that he wrote that brief memoir about Stubby for the newsletter of the Society of Former Members of the FBI. We find the photo taken at Catholic University of Conroy with Stubby and fellow students. And we find more pictures. A framed montage of Stubby’s most-published images. A few prints showing Conroy visiting Stubby at the Smithsonian. Photos of the aging veteran, his thick head of hair turned white but his trademark smile as bright as ever.

  There are non-Stubby items, too. An old address book. Banking records. Christening cups that belonged to Conroy’s twin sisters. But Stubby is a unifying theme. Imagine having such items filed alongside your other family history of births and deaths, graduations and marriages. When you inherit a story, it becomes a part of you till death do you part.

  Curtis Deane, as the eldest grandchild, may have known Conroy the best of his three siblings, and he appreciated his grandfather’s passion for the old YD mascot. One could even say he inherited that passion. In the 1990s, Deane helped rescue Stubby from a long-term-storage banishment that had followed a reorganization of exhibition themes at the Smithsonian. Stubby, after languishing for decades kenneled in a packing crate on an archival storage shelf, spent several years on exhibition at the state armory in Hartford. Conroy’s grandson answered newspaper queries about the famous mascot, too, and he was the first family member I found when I began tracking the scattered trail of evidence that his grandfather had left behind.

  Although Robert Conroy gave the Smithsonian most of the artifacts from his years with Stubby, he held on to a few mementos from their friendship, including this postwar publicity shot. The mascot’s Iron Cross, appropriated from the German soldier he captured in the fall of 1918, can be seen hanging from the back of his jacket.

  In 2004, Stubby returned to a place of honor at the Smithsonian Institution. He is one of 16 key artifacts displayed in the World War I section of the “Price of Freedom” gallery, a comprehensive overview of American warfare that is one of the featured permanent exhibitions at the National Museum of American History. There Stubby stands, behind protective glass, in profile, his head ever cocked to the right, eyes focused on the horizon. A gas-mask-wearing doughboy towers over him clutching a bayonet-tipped rifle. Cher Ami, bless the poor bird’s heart, stands beside him, perpetually balanced on its one remaining leg.

  Stubby’s jacket is not on display. The weight of all those medals pulling on the thin chamois leather would, given enough time, tear the material, so it resides in a customized archival storage box, as does Stubby’s harness and other assorted memorabilia. The mascot’s scrapbook, so legitimately dog-eared at this point that it has come apart from its binding, has now been digitally scanned as an added measure of preservation.

  The day after we opened the Conroy history box, Alex, Curt, and their brother Jon and I visited Stubby at the Smithsonian. Four of Conroy’s great-granddaughters joined us. Smithsonian curator Kathy Golden graciously opened up a conference room for the party and filled it with Stubby’s belongings. For two hours, family members passed around the Mylar-protected pages of the scrapbook, laughing at lines here, commenting on family resemblances there, marveling at the dog’s fame and their patriarch’s devotion to him. Then we visited Stubby, himself, at the “Price of Freedom” hall, and family members posed in front of the mascot’s case. If Conroy could have been there, he would have been beaming. I beamed in his place.

  Robert Conroy and his friends from the Great War knew something that took decades for the U.S. military to figure out: Dogs and soldiers go together. Today we take it for granted that military service dogs help soldiers find hidden explosive devices, that they are essential team members on Navy Seal raids such as the one that stormed the residence of Osama bin Laden, and that they can still add their teeth to the fight, just the way Stubby did in 1919. Today we are even learning, as David E. Sharpe has shown through Companions For Heroes, that dogs have remarkable powers for healing old wounds, for restoring a sense of purpose in the wake of unspeakable trauma, for making a person feel whole once more. The shell-shocked veterans of World War I could have used such dogs. Robert Conroy was lucky enough to have one.

  The U.S. military made official use of dogs during the Second World War. Among other duties, they served as sentries, delivered messages, scouted combat zones, listened for enemy aircraft, and helped recover the dead. Hundreds of dogs traveled to Asia during the Vietnam War, making such an impact on the troops that some fans advocated (unsuccessfully) for the addition of a military service dog to the sculptures at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. As far back as the First World War, veterans had sought to recognize their four-footed companions. Who could forget those rescue dogs that had combed the battlefields with medicine, bandages, and water? In that case a memorial did become a reality; it stands in the nation’s oldest pet cemetery, north of New York City in Hartsdale, New York.

  Those soldiers from a century ago could not have imagined all the roles dogs would go on to play in the military, but they probably wouldn’t be surprised by the services they now render, on battlefields and beyond. Dogs serve in the police force. They use their sense of smell to unearth everything from illegal drugs to missing persons to the scat that helps scientists study endangered species. They patrol golf courses to keep them free from destructive flocks of geese. They work hard—like dogs—because that’s what they like to do. Scientists are beginning to better understand why: Dogs complete people like no other animal can, and vice versa. Connections forged 12,000 or more years ago, when wolves and domesticated dogs diverged, happened for a reason. Humans and dogs both benefited from the alliance. And they still do.

  In 1918, after the fighting stopped, and even eight years later when Stubby died, Americans thought the memory of the Great War would last forever. “Down through the coming ages, into time not yet reckoned, there will be stories and tales of valor unfolded; vivid descriptions of the beginning of the drive at Château-Thierry, the smashing of the Hindenburg Line, the closing of the St. Mihiel salient or the bloody drive through the Argonne Forest.” So wrote a contributor to the New Britain Herald on the occasion of Stubby’s death in 1926. “All these will form traditions ranking with the best with which this country has ever been bound,” the writer assured the paper’s readers.

  The tribute continued: “But, to New England folks, whose sons were members of the Yankee Division, ‘New England’s Own,’ there will be one story which will ever be dear to those whose memory still holds the picture of the dark days of 1917-18 when the youth of this nation was striving to uphold the country’s glorious record on the field of battle. That story will be the history of Stubby, the mascot of the 102nd Regiment, 26th Division.”

  At least some of these lofty predictions have come true. Details of battles may have dimmed, but the tale of Stubby’s life has come down through the years of history. His story endures as testimony to the love that grows, even in the darkest days of combat; to the trust that means true friendship; to the devotion that one man can show for a dog—a devotion so strong that, decades after the man’s death and almost a century after the birth of their friendship, their story not only endures, it thrives. It thrives and inspires, just as that journalist had long-ago forecast, just as Robert Conroy had
always hoped it would, as one of the great stories to come down through the ages.

  The story of a man and his dog, a dog and his man, inseparably bonded for life and ever after.

  RESEARCH NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  THE STORY OF THE CREATION OF SERGEANT STUBBY IS THE story of its acknowledgments. For starters, there would be no book were it not for J. Robert Conroy. His devotion to his friend, even after Stubby’s death, accounts for the existence of this book. Had Conroy not succeeded in placing Stubby in the Smithsonian, the dog’s fame would surely have faded and been lost. By making the Smithsonian the central repository for all things Stubby, including the dog’s scrapbook, he assured that a core collection of archival materials would endure into the ages. Thank you, Bob Conroy!

  Of all the surviving artifacts, Stubby included, it is his scrapbook that best preserves his story. It serves as a cipher for understanding the old mascot’s historical pedigree. Conroy created the book with love, not with the training of a historian, so the album has its drawbacks. Most of the articles Conroy saved were clipped without evidence of publication date or place. The process of identifying the provenance for these stories was a tedious one. I was able to trace many of them through online databases for such newspapers as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Hartford Courant. Incredibly helpful Connecticut librarians (more on these women later) helped pinpoint others. Some articles continue to float unattributed, but even they begin to fall into place using the context of their content.