Photo courtesy Mimi Fuller, "Cincinnati Post"
The motley eccentrics who patronize Arnold’s Bar & Grill downtown have always been as integral to the atmosphere of that fine establishment as anything on the menu. During the early years of Jim Tarbell’s ownership, one of the most eccentric regulars was Bart, who had the distinction of possessing four legs. Bart adopted Arnold’s and Arnold’s accommodated Bart, a bona fide dog.
Bart was most definitely not a seeing-eye dog. Let’s get that out of the way right at the start. He had estimable directional skills and was apparently irresistible to ladies of the canine persuasion. He knew no doggie tricks or, if he did, he resolutely refused to demonstrate them. Bart made himself at home wherever he damn well pleased, often in a warm spot behind the bar at Arnold’s on Eighth Street. That’s where he was when the health inspector came calling.
“Esquire magazine designated Arnold’s one of the best bars in America, and they sent someone to Cincinnati to do a story about it,” Tarbell tells me. “It just so happened to be the day when the health inspector dropped by unexpectedly. This guy had a reputation. He had kind of an Officer Krupke demeanor. He was pretty strict. No nonsense. And there’s Bart in his usual spot, lying on his back with his wanger hanging out and the inspector points at him and asks, Is that a seeing-eye dog? The bartender at the time, God bless him, puts his hand over his eyes and comes stumbling out from behind the bar, bumping into things as if he was blind.”
Tarbell confesses that Bart had a congenital disrespect for authority. He nipped a meter reader on the fetlock one day and was hauled off to the hoosegow. The gang at Arnold’s raised a $40 bail fund and got Bart paroled, with enough left over to procure the pooch some dinner at Wendy’s.
Bart was not Tarbell’s dog. He was, without a doubt, nobody’s dog. He was never registered, never tagged, never owned by anyone. Bart chose who he would associate with, and it was often one of the residents on Spring Street in Pendleton, especially Tarbell or the potter Michael Frasca. Tarbell found himself on Spring Street because of St. Paul’s Church. The parish population had dwindled to nothing, and the magnificent church and associated buildings gobbled repair funds. There were plans to demolish everything for a parking lot.
Tarbell convinced the Archdiocese of Cincinnati to let him live on the premises while he searched for a buyer to preserve the edifice. His legendary Frezznafrail Follies dinners relocated to the rectory. After much effort, including a benefit concert headlined by Indian sitar master Ravi Shankar, the Verdin Company purchased the property to be used as their headquarters and an event center.
“After I finished my tour of duty at St. Paul’s and the Verdin Company was moving in, I had to find a place to live, and both me and my crazies wanted a garden,” says Tarbell. “I found a house for $500 on Spring Street. It was condemned, falling apart, but it had a yard. The house had one working cold-water faucet, and I dug up a wood-burning stove somewhere and moved in. And that was our garden. One midwinter night I must have left the door open, and these two hound dogs slipped in and sat beside me at the stove. That was Bart and his brother Art.”
Art was a gourmand and a homebody, quite the opposite of his wastrel sibling. Tarbell said Art “finked out” on Bart after being lured into the kitchen of a woman on Main Street who somehow thought Art was the reincarnation of her previous dog, Trixie.
“Of the two, Art is the one who would settle for a leash,” Tarbell told The Cincinnati Post’s Lew Moores back in 1982. “He’s living the life of Riley. He gets ground chuck every day. After he was dognapped, someone cut a hole in the lady’s fence and let Art out, but he went back in. She still has him, and she’s been real good to him. Art has stayed with her by choice.”
To the contrary, Bart was a rolling stone. In his heyday, Bart sightings became an enduring entertainment for the folks who lived around the downtown area. Tarbell is convinced Bart was able to read. It’s the only logical explanation for his uncanny navigational talents that took him from downtown to Mt. Adams and as far afield as Dillonvale. Bart was spotted in Clifton one day, just chilling at a bus stop. When the downtown-bound coach pulled up, he hopped aboard as if he knew exactly where he was going. Bart’s travels sprang from one consistent motivation: He was looking for love. Bart, Tarbell says, was an incurable romantic and somehow had girlfriends all over the city. A long-term relationship with a lady friend near Union Terminal kept him wandering the far reaches of the West End, and Bart seems to have considered Findlay Market his own private singles bar. He must have had some game.
Whatever attracted the female attention, it wasn’t Bart’s looks. Moores effectively served as Bart’s press agent, but even he acknowledged Bart’s limitations. At various times, Moores called Bart “a log on wheels,” “a sausage of a dog,” “a cigar-shaped mixed breed,” and “hapless.” Given his ungainly physique, his success with the females confused a lot of people, but Moores offered two theories, each somewhat plausible: “Some claim it’s his tenacity; others say it’s pity.”
“Bart is not Old Yeller,” Moores wrote in The Post. “He’s never saved anyone from a pack of rogue boars, never barked to alert a sleeping family of a house on fire, never tugged on a shirt sleeve and led a forest ranger to a kid neck-deep in quicksand.”
Although he would never win any dog show medals, Bart had a real flair for empathy. Frasca told Moores, “He hangs around with a lot of different people. Old people, drunks, kids. And when he’s with them he adapts to them. If Bart is walking with an old man, he just pokes along. If he’s with a kid, he’s at a gallop. If it’s a drunk, Bart staggers.”
Although Tarbell continually insisted to anyone and everyone that Bart was not his dog, Bart was such a regular at Arnold’s that neighbors would often check in there if they hadn’t seen him for a while. Those inquiries reached a fever pitch in the late summer of 1982 when Bart’s absence stretched into a third week. Arnold’s customers got together a $25 reward for information about their unofficial mascot, and all sorts of theories emerged to explain Bart’s disappearance. No one believed that Bart had settled down or that someone had managed to fence him in. “Bart was too smart,” says Tarbell. “Einstein would’ve had a hard time keeping him in one place.”
One day, a man out in Finneytown telephoned Tarbell to say, “I think I’ve got your boy.” Sure enough, there was Bart, canoodling with the man’s basset hound, Hazel. Bart’s rediscovery only ramped up the conspiracy theories. How did he manage to travel to Finneytown? Although his bus rides were well known, he would have had to transfer to arrive at Hazel’s house and few were willing to acknowledge that Bart’s comprehension of the Queen City Metro system was that detailed.
Many celebrated Bart’s return, but not Jim Tarbell. “Bart is back and on the loose in Pendleton,” Moores wrote in the newspaper. “That he’s making his rounds, Tarbell says, has had one drawback. Because a $25 reward was offered for Bart’s return, people keep picking him up as he makes his neighborhood jaunts, returning him to Tarbell and trying to claim the reward.”
In addition to his amorous escapades, Bart made a few formal appearances, notably in the St. Patrick’s Day parade, in which he pranced along every year as if he’d been voted Grand Marshal. Each year, Bart pranced a tad slower. The storied manager of the New York Yankees, Casey Stengel, was once asked if sex really affected a player’s performance, and Stengel admitted it wasn’t the sex but the chasing after it that dulled the team’s abilities. And so it was with Bart. Only 9, middle-aged in dog years, his sybaritic lifestyle had taken its toll. He leaned toward roly-poly, and his gallop had drifted into a canter.
One day, Bart wandered into Arnold’s looking more bedraggled than normal. “I will swear he had tire tracks on his back,” says Tarbell. Later that afternoon, some kids found Bart’s body at the curb on Liberty Street. In his last fatal dash at rush hour across that thoroughfare, he wasn’t able to dodge a reckless driver.
“So why was he crossing Liberty Street in the first place?” Moores asked in a follow-up Post piece. “Bart may have been an old dog, but he had not resigned himself to a life without romance. He was, as usual, on his way to visit yet another new main squeeze, a dog who lives down on Main Street.”
That was certainly in character, Tarbell recalls. “Still right on target, right to the end.”
Tarbell gathered up the earthly remains of the dog that was most definitely not his dog and saw that Bart was properly buried in the garden of that house on Spring Street, where the two mongrels had met one midwinter night almost a decade earlier.
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