Dad had been enchanted by the captious ways of a female poodle
named Agneau (French for lamb) which he kept briefly for some friends
away on vacation, so he got Dubout when I was 6 or so. All these
poodles were full-size standards.
Yum-Yum, seen above, came after Dubout, was the first female
poodle we had....what
a sweetheart. In the background can be seen one of Dad's cars, a
Maserati 3500GT, their first non-race grand touring car, which he
picked up for a song, effectively from an estate sale.
Anyway...Yumyuum would sit down in the middle of our road, with her back to traffic: one day, that was the end of her: one of those miserable people who either don't look or think it's fun to run over animals. A wonderful pair of poodles followed: Sam (white) and Posie (black); here they are as puppies in May of '67. There's a wonderful story about the time the family visited Jack (Molly's brother) and Sam staked out the territory...ask me about it.
Dubout was named after a particularly wild French artist. We had a book illustrated by him of Eramus' L'Eloge de la Folie with the most amazing pictures. Here's one of a wild medieval, (ahem) orgy. The book appears to be about war and youth and age and battle of the sexes; for those worried about political correctness, both sexes get skewered equally, to say nothing of the tomfoolery of the oldest sport.
