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Transcription: [00:12:00]
{SPEAKER name="Nancy Pope"}
and they took him in and fed him and he fell in love somehow with just mail bags, and big brown mail bags

{SPEAKER name="Felix Lapinski (interviewer)"}
he used to sleep on the bags or something
[00:12:07]


{SPEAKER name="Nancy Pope"}
yeah, he would sleep on the bags. And so he started following them and when the bag would moved, he would follow the bag. So if the bag went onto a wagon, he'd jump on the wagon.
[00:12:16]
And the bags of course, they'd end up on the trains so he would jump on the train. And he'd ride to wherever the train was going. And then he'd come back, you know, and he'd come back to Albany on the next train coming back, so the clerks--

[00:12:28]
{SPEAKER name="Felix Lapinski (interviewer)"}
not in the mail bag though

{SPEAKER name="Nancy Pope"}
not in, but always on and with. So the clerks put a little tag around on his collar that said "I'm Owney, if you see me, return me to Albany Post Office."

[00:12:39]
{SPEAKER name="Felix Lapinski (interviewer)"}
I see, yes

{SPEAKER name="Nancy Pope"}
And other clerks started getting ideas as Owney kept traveling, because he kept going further and further away, of adding tags. So pretty soon, Owney's neck was almost on the floor, because he had so many tags.

{SPEAKER name="Felix Lapinski (interviewer)"}
[[laughter]] Yes, yes.
[00:12:51]


{SPEAKER name="Nancy Pope"}
on his collar. So the Post Master General at that time, gave him, um made him or had made, this special jacket that they put on Owney and they put the tags on the jacket. And there's a wonderful quote from one of the newspapers at the time that said, "when he walked, he jingled like the bells of a junk wagon."

[00:13:08]
{SPEAKER name="Felix Lapinski (interviewer)"}
like a junk wagon [[laughter]]

{SPEAKER name="Nancy Pope"}
But, uh, he actually went around the world, following mail bags. He started in Tacoma, well, he got to Tacoma, Washington.
[00:13:19]
He got on a steam ship to Japan with the mail. Went to China and he was such a star, the reporters would know ahead of time, you know, Owney is on such and such steamer coming in, there'd be a story in the news done about this dog.

[00:13:33]
{SPEAKER name="Felix Lapinski (interviewer)"}
Well, there must have been some sort of human or organization behind those travel bits, weren't there?

[00:13:39]
{SPEAKER name="Nancy Pope"}
Not really, I mean he cho-- one thing that everyone loves about Owney is he chose where he went. Um, nobody could tell him to get on such and such train.
[00:13:47]
He would hop on the train he felt like hopping on. One time he went up to Canada and got into trouble because he didn't have a dog tag. He had five thousand other tags, but no dog tags.

{SPEAKER name="Felix Lapinski (interviewer)"}
dog tag. That's where the name comes from.
[00:13:58]

[[laughter]]

{SPEAKER name="Nancy Pope"}
And so--

{SPEAKER name="Felix Lapinski (interviewer)"}
Well, did he ever..
[00:14:00]