America’s Most Typical Boy-Dog Pair

For a few short days in 1931, 13-year-old Laurence Orne of 26 Harrison Street was the most famous Melrosian in the world. He met President Hoover at the White House, addressed the nation from New York City during the New Year’s Eve broadcast, and had his picture plastered over newspapers across the United States. The reason for this adulation? He and his dog, Paugus, had earned the distinction of being named the winners of the “America’s Most Typical Boy-Dog Pair” competition.

The contest had received over 6000 submissions. Laurence had the advantage of an excellent photographer. His father, Harold I. Orne, was a mountaineer and member of the Appalachian Mountain Club who was known for his stunning nature photos taken high in the White Mountains.

Paugus himself was a boon. In the early 20th century, Americans had become obsessed with the idea of purebred dogs, and Paugus boasted a genealogy. A Husky, one of his grandfathers had been Chinook, the lead sled dog on Richard Byrd’s Antarctic expedition, who in turn had been a great-grandson of one of the sled dogs on Robert Peary’s Arctic expeditions.

If anything, this lineage made Paugus rather atypical, but that was no doubt part of the attraction for the Chappell Foundation, the organization that sponsored the contest and that also funded research into dog genetics. Could there have been a similar factor at play in their selection of Laurence as the “typical” boy?

Winners at the state level were handed over to a committee of five to decide the national winner. The chair of that committee was Senator James J. Davis of Pennsylvania. Davis was an outspoken believer in eugenics who had written that the time had come to distinguish between “bad stock and good stock, weak blood and strong blood, sound heredity and sickly human stuff.” Davis put his beliefs to work as the nation’s leading advocate of immigration restrictions.

When Davis looked at Laurence’s photo and saw his fair skin and hair, can there be any doubt that he saw what he thought should be the “typical” American boy?

Laurence Orne died in 1992. Paugus died long before that, and is buried at Proctor Animal Cemetery in Nashua.