The Crying Dog Toy — Update 4: BREAKTHROUGH
There are only a few more days left of this year. And what a year it has been.
For me, this time was of grief, pain, mourning, and loss. The suffering I have experienced has been very much too heavy for me to bear. I lost my best friend, I lost my reason to keep going. The distance between me and my friends that I can only communicate with online has grown further and further in my mind. Isolation. Pain. Suffering.
I miss my girl.
I miss my friends.
I miss being passionate about the things I care about.
I crave a life of comfort and security that I have never experienced except for very brief and blurry flashes.
The past week I get sick. I wasn’t able to grab an at-home test kit, but I’m pretty sure I know what it was. I remained in isolation. Struggling to eat, feeling little except for pain.
But I get dreams.
Vivid dreams.
Of another Crying Dog Toy with a pocket in the ear.
Wearing a Cazza collar.
Is this her way of visitng me?
I hope it is.
These dreams are vivid and hopeful. I joke a couple days ago that perhaps they were prophetic.
And they were.
It starts out with a couple photos. New photos. Perhaps they were promotional shots from a silent film that has since become lost. Maybe they feature a celebrity who’s name has been omitted and likely will never be recoverable. I don’t know. But the crying dog was in them.
But these photos came without any leads, without any connections, and without any sources. They were devoid of context, uploaded as stock photos on shady websites that sell their images with shitty jpeg artifacts.
No information in the terms, tags, or titles, gave any indication about who this woman was, and what this photoshoot was for. The second photo, in which the crying dog is slung over the lady’s shoulder is reminiscent of the promotional photos for It (1927) but this is not Clara Bow. Perhaps, after the success of the “It Girl” this lady was inspired to pose similarly with the same titular crying dog. But we can only speculate.
The trail went cold again. But only for a few days.
The dreams continued. The crying dog toy with the Cazza collar continued to show itself to me.
And then,
I found it.
My breakthrough.
The website worthpoint had not worked properly for the entire search prior. It would crash and not load photos and not allow me to search. It would force me to perform their shitty captcha alternative where you would click and hold a button for no less than 30 seconds. Which rarely actually refreshed the page.
It was a web 3.0 nightmare. And despite that, I dug heavily through the site in the hopes of finding the crying dog toy. Some evidence that it existed. That surviving in the present digital era there were more than just two.
But there were never results.
Until yesterday.
For whatever reason, yesterday there were. I found it.
In color. A printed on face.
And, last but not least
…
We had found it. We had found another crying dog toy with a pocket in the ear.
All this time, our little red friend hadn’t been alone. A while ago, years perhaps, another had been sold. One who was golden yellow.
It would appear that he is not faded in color. As the dye appears to be uniform and solid throughout. But his ears are brown. And his fur is gold.
There is still only one little red dog.
But he is not alone when it comes to having a pocket in the ear.
We know now that at least three crying dog toys still exist today. Wherever those elusive two are, we do not know. Only the little red dog. Who will remain safe with me.
And a mystery is finally solved.
At least for the colored crying dogs with pockets, the “cheap plastic collar and leash” that the little red dog was found wearing, was indeed something that they all appear to have come with.
it is identical to little red dog’s collar.
I am glad that I kept that collar safe. As it is part of our little guy’s official history. Even if it is scratchy, brittle, and no longer worn by little red dog, it still deserves its spot in the collection. I will now be bringing it out and putting up closer to the rest of my prized possessions. Knowing that it wasn’t added after the fact. It isn’t a Cazza collar, but it is special.
This does have a bitterness to it. After all, I do not have the golden crying dog toy with the pocket in the ear. He was sold, long ago. Only watermarked photos remain to tell his story. Wherever he is now, he is gone from my hands. I cannot hope to ever have him. Just like pocketless tan. Seeing just the photos and knowing he is still so out of reach is sad, but that is how Cazza is to me now. Photos are all I have left. I have become painfully aware of how that feels.
The dreams make sense.
But there is a hope that the golden dog brings.
The little red dog did not have a tag. If you recall I painstakingly removed the remnants of a tag that did exist in order to get a better look at it. I noted that it was a thicker woven white fabric with some blue thread. And commented that the full tag was likely simplistic with blue embroidery.
At that time when all I had to go off of was just the red crying dog himself and no knowledge of the silent films or the patent I also had assumed he must have been from the 50s or 60s. But seeing solid photo evidence of them being around since the 20s changed that.
And yet, here we are.
It would turn out that forty years after the patent was filed, the pocketed dogs were made.
This worthpoint listing had a date. The 60s. And the crying dog, well, he had a tag.
We know who made them now.
The most important piece of the puzzle has finally been found.
While the design began in 1925 and remained virtually unchanged for more than 40 years, we can now say that at least as far as those with pockets in the ears are concerned, that the crying dog was made sometime in the 1960s by Woolikin.
If you’re at all familiar with how quickly toys are replaced, redesigned, changed, and discontinued over the course of not even decades but years, you’ll know how weird it is from a modern perspective to see that a toy designed in the 1920s looks nearly identical to the version made in the 1960s. In today’s day of consumerism and capitalist “ingenuity” only toys that get brought back for the purpose of nostalgia ever resemble older models or counterparts. You don’t see anyone but steiff making their expensive mohair button-in-ear animals anymore. Fisher Price only brings back popular favourites like the chatter telephone. And beanie babies look nothing like they did in the 90s.
Despite this, the crying dog lives.
Unfortunately, the search is now once again at a standstill.
No info about Woolikin or Woolno Inc. is online. For whatever reason I have seen some people claim that they are also Gund. To my knowledge there is nothing to corroborate this, but I will keep it in mind.
Coming from the 1960s gives us the hope that more of them survived. And the likelihood of some still being around in thrift stores and antique malls across America has increased exponentially. So I would like to remind you, dear reader, that I am offering quite the pretty penny if you can get one of them into my grubby little hands. Be a part of history! Help the cause! Grow the army!
Unless it was made for that wretched rat known as the Disney corporation unfortunately, few Woolikin items show up online if at all. But at the very least, Cazza has given me a way to better search to find another beloved crying dog. In case they ever do.
Thank you Cazza.
May we find another crying dog toy with a pocket in the ear and bring him home in 2023. In her memory. For her.
