Ben Hur Lampman
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Ben Hur Lampman (November 27, 1886–March 2, 1954) was a U.S. newspaper editor, essayist, short story writer, and poet. He was a longtime editor of The Oregonian in Portland, Oregon, and he served as poet laureate of Oregon from 1951 until his death.
Lampman was born in Wisconsin and raised in a small town in North Dakota. As a boy, he worked in his father's print shop. He left home at age 15 and worked in the wheat country of Canada. He returned to North Dakota and married Lena Sheldon, a New York City resident who had moved to the Dakotas to become a school teacher. He moved with his family to Gold Hill, Oregon, where he worked for the local newspaper. In 1916, he moved to Portland to become a reporter for The Oregonian. In 1920 he published an account of the 1919 Centralia Massacre. In 1921 he was appointed an editor of the editorial page.
He began publishing nature essays in The Oregonian. His stories and essays also appeared in national magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post. Some of his essays about life in Portland were collected in his 1942 book At the End of the Car Line. In 1943 he won an O. Henry Award for his short story "Blinker Was a Good Dog", which originally appeared in the Atlantic Monthly. Some of his papers and manuscripts are now in the collection of the library of the University of Oregon. He is buried in Lincoln Memorial Cemetery in Portland.
Lampman is also credited with a column which appeared in the Oregonian entitled "Where to Bury A Dog" which appears on a vast myriad of pet memorial websites. According to the Oregonian's Executive assistant to the Editor, Helen Shum, the piece is no longer under copyright as of 1992, and so I am able to include it here:
The following originally appeared in The Oregonian in 1926 and later was included in the author's book of essays and poems, "How Could I Be Forgetting."
A subscriber of the Ontario Argus has written to the editor of that fine weekly, propounding a certain question, which, so far as we know, yet remains unanswered. The question is this -- "Where shall I bury my dog?" It is asked in advance of death.
The Oregonian trusts the Argus will not be offended if this newspaper undertakes an answer, for surely such a question merits a reply, since the man who asked it, on the evidence of his letter, loves the dog. It distresses him to think of his favorite as dishonored in death, mere carrion in the winter rains. Within that sloping, canine skull, he must reflect when the dog is dead, were thoughts that dignified the dog and honored the master. The hand of the master and of the friend stroked often in affection this rough, pathetic husk that was a dog.
We would say to the Ontario man that there are various places in which a dog may be buried. We are thinking now of a setter, whose coat was flame in the sunshine, and who, so far as we are aware, never entertained a mean or an unworthy thought. This setter is buried beneath a cherry tree, under four feet of garden loam, and at its proper season the cherry strews petals on the green lawn of his grave. Beneath a cherry tree, or an apple, or any flowering shrub of the garden, is an excellent place to bury a good dog.
Beneath such trees, such shrubs, he slept in the drowsy summer, or gnawed at a flavorous bone, or lifted head to challenge some strange intruder. These are good places, in life or in death. Yet it is a small matter, and it touches sentiment more than anything else. For if the dog be well remembered, if sometimes he leaps through your dreams actual as in life, eyes kindling, questing, asking, laughing, begging, it matters not at all where that dog sleeps at long and at last.
On a hill where the wind is unrebuked, and the trees are roaring, or beside a stream he knew in puppyhood, or somewhere in the flatness of a pasture land, where most exhilarating cattle graze. It is all one to the dog, and all one to you, and nothing is gained, and nothing lost -- if memory lives. But there is one best place to bury a dog. One place that is best of all.
If you bury him in this spot, the secret of which you must already have, he will come to you when you call -- come to you over the grim, dim frontiers of death, and down the well-remembered path, and to your side again. And though you call a dozen living dogs to heel they shall not growl at him, nor resent his coming, for he is yours and he belongs there. People may scoff at you, who see no lightest blade of grass bent by his footfall, who hear no whimper pitched too fine for mere audition, people who may never really have had a dog. Smile at them then, for you shall know something that is hidden from them, and which is well worth the knowing. The one best place to bury a good dog is in the heart of its master.
