Looking for Tige

I thought his name was “Tide.” A dog named “Tide” didn’t make any sense to me, but I was only nine years old and I didn’t know any other word that sounded like “Tide.”

I’d never heard a name like “Tige.” So “Tide” it was.

And what was he doing in the shoe?

Every Saturday morning at 11:30 I turned on the radio in the sun parlor, lay down on the bed that served as the sofa, and listened to "Smilin' Ed's Buster Brown Gang."

The show opened with a short dog bark: “Arf,” and then a small boy’s excited voice: “Hey, kids. It’s the Buster Brown Show!”

For me, the program was memorable because of the “characters” that Smilin’ Ed McConnell featured each week. My favorite was Froggy the Gremlin who, true to his name, spoke with a croaky voice. There was a cat named Midnight who meowed in response to Smilin’ Ed’s questions. And there was Ed himself, who bubbled with enthusiasm and had an infectious laugh that set off hysterical laughter and screaming among the kids in his studio audience.

Froggy was invisible—apparently that was a characteristic of Gremlins—but Ed could get him to “appear” by instructing Froggy to “Pluck your magic twanger.” I did not know what a “twanger” was, but the sound effect that followed Froggy’s action in response to Ed’s request convinced me that a twanger must be a huge, tightly stretched rubber band. Imagination was a big factor in “seeing” what was happening in a radio show.

Smilin’ Ed read an adventure story each program, usually set in the jungles of India. I no longer remember any of these stories. What does remain though, I suppose because it was repeated throughout the show, and then week after week, was the commercial for the sponsor: Buster Brown Shoes. Whatever the commercial message was, it was always introduced in the same way, in the voice of a young boy.

“That’s my dog, Tige; He lives  in a shoe.

I’m Buster Brown. Look for me in there too.”

Buster Brown did not appear as a character in the radio show. By the 1940s he was just a name on a shoe, and a cartoon-like caricature in some of the display ads in the stores. Tige was usually next to him.

                

         

Buster Brown began as a character in a newspaper comic strip in 1902. Later, the rights to his name were bought by a shoe company, and the shoes were named for him. Even later, but still long before Smilin’ Ed’s show, Buster Brown appeared in short movies in the Twenties. So there was a real Tige. He was “played” by an American Pit Bull Terrier, the same dog that appeared in later films as “Petey” or “Pete the Pup” in the Our Gang comedies— the dog with the ring around one eye.

As I said, I converted Tige to the only word I knew that sounded the same: Tide.

I didn’t think a lot about why a dog would have a name like Tide (much less Tige). What interested me, what aroused my curiosity, was what was a dog doing in somebody’s shoe? I had Buster Brown shoes. I couldn’t see any dog in them. Was he invisible, like Froggy?

There was a way to find out. The shoe store on Liberty Heights Avenue, Wyman’s—the one that carried Buster Brown shoes—had a fluoroscope machine. It was, in fact, an X-ray machine. Its purpose was to permit the shoe salesman to demonstrate how well the shoe fit.

 

The Fluoroscope

Here’s how it worked. After selecting a pair of shoes, your mother and you accompanied the salesman to the machine. You stepped up onto a low platform and slid your feet into a slot cut out of the bottom of the machine. At eye level (for a child) there was an opening that you could look into. The salesman pushed a button, and suddenly you saw the outline of the shoes, within which were the bones of your feet. You knew it was your feet because you could wiggle your toes, and the bones would wiggle back at you. And it was all in a foggy green glow. The machine was designed in such a way that the X-ray beam turned off after about ten or twenty seconds. If your mother was skeptical about the fit, the salesman would give you another shot of X-rays. I don’t recall that anyone thought this might be dangerous. That’s why we figured it would be OK to check out other things in the fluoroscope.

Fortunately, you could not get your head through the slot. Of course, you could not see your own head, since you had to be looking through the viewer at the top. But you could see a friend’s head—if it fit into the slot, and if he were really stupid! I’m pretty sure some of my friends were dumb enough to stick their heads in; happily their heads were too large.

You could get a hand in the slot. Again, not your own if you wanted to see it. But you could get a friend to stick his hand in when a salesman was not keeping an eye on the machine. Hand bones were not very interesting, so you only did this once.

If you go back today and read the old Buster Brown comic strips from a hundred years ago, you quickly learn that Buster was a mischievous boy. He had very bad judgment. Tige tried to exercise some control over him, to be a good influence, but how much could a dog (even a Pit Bull) do? I guess that’s why we got mischievous ideas in the Buster Brown shoe store.

A few doors down from Wyman’s Shoes was McCrory’s Five and Dime store. You could buy a turtle, about the size of a small hamburger, for about ten cents. We had the idea that we could place a turtle through the foot slot and turn on the machine and watch it crawl around. We developed an elaborate plan.

If one of the girls in our class were there with her Mom, trying on shoes, we would wait for an opportune moment. When it appeared that they were ready to step up onto the fluoroscope, one of us would insert a turtle through the slot. As the trio looked through the viewers to admire the “fit,” and as the turtle began to crawl about her feet, the girl would begin screaming. The salesman would jerk his head up and look toward the front door, but all he would see would be our backs as we raced out onto Liberty Heights Avenue and dashed down to the corner of Garrison Boulevard, where we would catch the streetcar that would take us safely home.

We thought about that idea through most of the summer, mostly arguing about who would place the turtle in the slot. When summer finally came to an end, so did our plan. We never carried it out. I guess Tige was a better influence over us than we imagined he could be.