The 1928 Crossing That Gave America Seeing Eye Dogs

On the morning of June 11, 1928, a twenty-year-old from Nashville walked down a gangplank in New York with a German shepherd he had met in April. A crowd of reporters had come to see whether a blind man could really be led through a city by a dog. He crossed West Street, the waterfront route where the freight trucks ran, and the dog took him over.

A Magazine Article and One Letter

Morris Frank had lost one eye in a riding accident at six and the other in a boxing match at sixteen.

By his late teens he was navigating Nashville on a friend's arm or a hired guide, and he hated it.

In November 1927 The Saturday Evening Post ran a piece called "The Seeing Eye" by Dorothy Harrison Eustis, an American dog breeder living in Switzerland. It described German shepherds in Germany being trained to lead soldiers blinded in the war.

Frank wrote to her. She wrote back, and in February 1928 she telephoned to invite him to Switzerland to find out for himself.

"Mrs. Eustis, to get my independence back, I'd go to hell," he answered.

Six Weeks and a New Name

He sailed in April 1928 to Fortunate Fields, Eustis's kennel above Vevey, and was handed a German shepherd named Kiss.

Frank could not imagine calling that down a city street, so she became Buddy.

The two of them went through six weeks of training under the American trainer Elliott "Jack" Humphrey, working curbs, stairs, shop doorways and the traffic of Vevey until they moved as one animal.

West Street

Back in New York, the press wanted proof, and they got it on West Street.

The street carried the Hudson waterfront's freight traffic: ten-ton trucks, taxis leaning on their horns. Buddy stopped, waited, and took him over.

"I lost all sense of direction and surrendered myself entirely to the dog," Frank said later. He remembered the trucks, the horns, the drivers shouting, and hugging Buddy on the other side.

He did it again that evening on Broadway in the rush hour.

Then he wired Eustis in Switzerland. The telegram was one word: "Success."

The Dogs Are Trained to Disobey

Frank and Eustis incorporated The Seeing Eye on January 29, 1929, in Nashville, and it is the oldest guide dog school in the United States.

It has since put more than 18,000 dogs and handlers together, and counting.

The school still breeds its own animals, on a 330-acre station at Chester, New Jersey, and trains them on its campus at Morris Township. German shepherds, Labradors, golden retrievers and Lab-golden crosses.

The hardest thing they learn is how to refuse. The Seeing Eye calls it intelligent disobedience: the dog is trained to ignore a command that would put the team in danger, such as crossing against oncoming traffic or stepping off an empty subway platform.

Volunteer families raise the puppies from about seven weeks old until they are a year or more, then hand them back for four months of formal training.

One Name, Retired

Buddy guided Frank until her death in May 1938.

Every Seeing Eye dog he had after her was called Buddy too.

In 1978 he became the first person to reach fifty years with a Seeing Eye dog, and he died two years after that.

The school then retired the name Buddy in her honor. It names around 500 puppies a year, and Buddy is not among them.