The Red Bank Register front page for March 5, 1924, (Red Bank Public Library archives. Click to enlarge.)
By BRIAN DONOHUE
Bum was good boy. A very, very good boy. And then, all of a sudden, he was found dead.
On March 5, 1924, readers of redbankgreen’s predecessor, the Red Bank Register, learned of the tragic poisoning death of “Bum,” a beloved local personality who just happened to be a St. Bernard.
An ad that ran in the same edition of the Register. No necropsy was conducted on Bum to see if he accidentally ingested Mrs. Walsh’s stash of Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound, but it remains a leading theory among present day Red Bank journalists. (Red Bank Public Library archives. Click to enlarge)
Bum was born on a barge and brought to Red Bank by his master, Ensley White, and enjoyed traveling up and down the North Shrewsbury River (now known as the Navesink) with the White boys, the story reads. He once nudged back to shore a small boy who had waded too far from shore, likely preventing a tragedy.
Indeed, the paper reported on page one, the White family dog had “traits that were almost human.”
Bum attended council meetings with Councilman William H. White. He roamed the streets and strangers patted him on the head. There was no mention of his penchant for belly rubs, but we can all assume.
“Bum was a friend of everybody,’’ the Register reported.
And then, as February turned to March, Bum was found poisoned to death.
He wasn’t the only one. Four other dogs were found dead of poisoning in Red Bank the same week.
The article suggested two possible causes for the poisoning. The dogs may have eaten some of the free rat poison distributed as part of an anti-rodent campaign. (That same year marked a headline-grabbing outbreak in Los Angeles of pneumonic plague, which is spread by rat feces.)
Or the dogs were deliberately killed by people handing them meat laced with poison. There are no further mentions of Bum or the other poisonings in subsequent editions. If the latter theory was correct, someone took the secret of Bum’s death to their grave.
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