Welcome to the first ever Thank Dog it’s Friday! Every week we will be presenting a famous dog in history. Maybe you will laugh, hopefully you won’t cry and you’ll probably be a little more ready to take on the weekend.
So, in honor of Memorial Day coming up our first famous pup goes to Sergeant Stubby, the most decorated war dog of WWI! Yay Stubby!
Not only is Stubby a true American hero, but he defines the old American adage of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps—though after thorough research, I’m yet you find evidence that Stubby wore shoes of any kind. None the less, this very American Pit Bull Terrier was found on the Yale campus by a young soldier named John Robert Conroy. After teaching Stubby how to march, salute, and spit-shine shoes Conroy smuggled him to the Great War in France.
He started with providing morale-lifting visits up and down the French line, but Stubby soon graduated to giving early warnings about gas attacks and incoming artillery shells coming from the Germans. In April of 1918 Stubby was injured by a hand grenade and taken to Paris for a little R&R. But he wasn’t out at cafés smokin’ Gauloises, oh no, he reportedly saved a little girl from getting hit by a car. Soon after he returned to the front lines for a little more life saving.
Soon after returning to America with Conroy, Stubby was decorated by General “Black Jack” Pershing and the First Lady Florence Harding. He wore his cool little jacket and medals until he died, of being too freaking awesome, at the ripe old age of 10. But Stubby is still around, actually, as his remains have been creepily preserved and are on display at the Smithsonian.
So have a grateful freedom filled weekend, and don’t forget to give your favorite four legged buddy a pat on the back for his ancestors contributions to the this awesome country!
![thedailywhat:
Weekend Read of the Day: Esquire columnist Stephen Marche investigates how Facebook and social media have made us more densely networked — and more lonely — than ever.
Within this world of instant and absolute communication, unbounded by limits of time or space, we suffer from unprecedented alienation. We have never been more detached from one another, or lonelier. In a world consumed by ever more novel modes of socializing, we have less and less actual society. We live in an accelerating contradiction: the more connected we become, the lonelier we are. We were promised a global village; instead we inhabit the drab cul-de-sacs and endless freeways of a vast suburb of information.
[atlantic]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m2fhenFk4k1qzpwi0o1_500.jpg)
