[ SHOWGSD-L ] Joan Ford: A great lady. We miss you already.
- From: "Gail Sprock" <gsprock@xxxxxxx>
- To: <showgsd-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2007 18:19:39 -0400
Hi all,
Way back in 1984, Dan Seni and I visited Joan and Fran Ford at their home in
Grove City, Ohio. The reason for the visit was to interview the Fords for
the annual magazine I published at the time. Today, when we've just learned
that Joan has passed, I wanted to share some of her words with you all. If
we had to vote on who the classiest couple in our breed is, I think many of
us would find it easy to say: Joan and Fran. I just want to provide you with
some words from that long ago interview. And I will add to it over the next
two days.
- Gail Sprock
Joan: We wanted to get into showing and breeding. We didn't breed then
because we lived in town and didn't have enough room, so we decided we would
buy something we could show and start that way. We moved out here in the
country so as to do some breeding. We had a good five years of learning from
going to dog shows, seeing other people's breeding and reading whatever we
could get our hands on. We were novices then like any other novices. Well
anyway, we bought a bitch, drove back home, and thought we really had
something. We found out later that, first of all, the dog had been kept in a
basement most of her life. She had a lot of black on her, bi-color, sort of
like the Red Rock's Gino type. We put her in the car and started for home
and every time a truck went by on the road she would hit the roof. We
thought, at first, that she was normally frightened.and that she was. She
had not seen much daylight and she was six months old. Like any other
novice, we hadn't looked in her mouth. She was missing at least five or six
teeth. We had asked if the bitch's mouth was okay and were told that she was
missing a couple of teeth only. Well, we had paid $150. for the bitch. After
we discovered that she was almost toothless, plus the fact that you couldn't
catch her with a net, we called the breeder. The dog went back to Pittsburgh
and we got our money back.
That bitch could have been our foundation bitch! But instead our foundation
bitch was Elsa vom Grunes Tahl, who we leased from Ollie Conti. We showed
her for a while, had her when we moved out here and had a litter out of her
by Richter von Leibestraum. . We were hoping to get something much like Elsa
but it didn't work out. We did have some nice puppies though and took two of
them to our first Futurity in Georgia. We went first with he male and second
with the bitch. But they were only fair puppies, not as good as we really
wanted. We didn't realize what great puppies were at that time; that came
later when bred Elsa to Fortune of Arbywood and had Lance's litter. Then we
saw the difference.
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