Buddy, The First American Seeing Eye Dog
Chronicle/Alamy Stock PhotoMorris Frank and Buddy, the first American seeing eye dog.
Seventy years before Roselle guided her owner out of the World Trade Center on 9/11, another dog made history as the United States’ first seeing eye dog. Her name was Buddy.
Buddy, a German Shepherd originally named “Kiss,” was born in October 1926 in a small village in Switzerland. She and other dogs were trained by an American, Dorothy Harrison Eustis, to help World War I veterans who’d been blinded during the conflict. An ocean away, a blind man named Morris Frank heard about Eustis’ work and reached out.
Eustis invited Frank to Fortunate Fields, the dog training school she’d started in Switzerland, and matched Frank with Buddy. For Frank, who had been frustrated with his lack of independence in the United States, learning to work with Buddy to navigate the world felt like a revelation.
“As I put my hands down on Buddy, I knew that she was going to be my declaration of independence, and give me back the freedom that I so long desired,” he once said, according to CBS News.
The Museum of the American Printing House for the BlindMorris Frank, Dorothy Harrison Eustis, and Buddy in 1936.
Frank and Buddy flew back to the United States in 1928, where he demonstrated the dog’s abilities by easily crossing two of Manhattan’s busiest streets. The following year, Frank and Eustis opened The Seeing Eye, a school for seeing eye dogs.
Buddy served Frank loyally until her death in 1938. (Like Sgt. Stubby, she was exalted in a New York Times obituary.) Afterward, Frank worked with a dog named Buddy 2, who guided him through the 1939 New York World’s Fair.
But he never forgot about Buddy, the famous dog who started a movement for blind people like himself.
“She also would be the pioneer of the guide dog movement in the United States,” Frank recalled, “for the blind men and women who neither wanted charity nor pity.”
