Opinion: Gilbert, Lux and Rex: A century of service dogs helping disabled Minnesotans

Opinion editor’s note: Strib Voices publishes a mix of guest commentaries online and in print each day. To contribute, click here.

•••

Minnesota dogs have always worked. The story and pictures of Melissa Hortman and her family dog, Gilbert, reminded me of this fact. The Minnesota Historical Society has photographs of dachshunds from Zimmerman working as entertainers during World War II, and of Duke, a dog that operated a cream separator on a Minnesota dairy farm in the same era. Dakota and Ojibwe people also used dogs to carry household equipment by toboggan. Minnesotans still train hunting dogs.

What Minnesotans perhaps do not realize is that our state played a huge role in developing service dogs in this country a century ago. Hortman and her family were carrying on this selfless volunteer work before she and her husband, Mark, along with Gilbert, died earlier this month.

I became aware of this legacy when my son, the filmmaker Frankie McNamara, was in high school and participated in the State History Day. Frankie had received a service dog, a black lab named Hunter, from Hearing and Service Dogs of Minnesota. Frankie has muscular dystrophy. Hunter was the best dog, helped Frankie with everyday tasks and became a beloved member of our household. He arrived at age 2, after living with a puppy raiser like Hortman.

What we did not know at the time, but learned through Frankie’s research, is that guide dogs for the blind originated in Minnesota.

•••

“Mr. Sinykin is an artist in his work.”

— Alan Firestone, 1955

•••

John Sinykin (1897-1990) was a visionary St. Paul-Minneapolis businessman of Russian Jewish heritage who pioneered the concept of teaching German shepherds special communication skills to assist blind people. Sinykin founded His Master’s Eyes Institute in Minnesota in 1926, the first school in the U.S. to train dogs as guides for the blind. His legacy is enormous for the disabled community worldwide, but he is a little-known figure in Minnesota history. Over the decades, Sinykin trained more than a thousand German shepherds for blind people in his LaSalle Kennels in Minnesota, often walking through Minneapolis’ Loring Park with these remarkable guide dogs.

•••

“On a day in the early 1920s, John L. Sinykin, then president of a Twin City wholesale drug firm, was returning by train from Washington, D.C. His attention was arrested by a blind man, groping his way down the aisle to the water fountain and back. Although Sinykin did not know it then, this brief incident involving an anonymous blind man was to change his life radically and give birth to a far-reaching program of concrete help for these handicapped persons. His achievements, despite many obstacles, should have earned for him the highest honors, for he was indeed the American pioneer in this work. Yet, he is largely an unsung hero, not even locally well known for his work.”

— Roy Wirtzfeld, a blind Minnesota writer, 1961

•••

Geraldine Lawhorn, an African-American entertainer from Chicago, learned to communicate with “Blondie,” a Master Eye Dog. For Sinykin, this case provided communication challenges because Lawhorn was both blind and deaf. Lawhorn came to Minneapolis in 1939 when she was 19 to work with Sinykin and Blondie, a cream-colored German shepherd. “It took three months to train Geraldine … she could feel vibrations.”

— Interview with Marvin Sinykin, who was a young boy in 1939

•••

Marvin Sinykin, a Minneapolis lawyer and the son of John Sinykin, told me in 2006, “Lambert Kreimer was a German officer wounded in World War I and while recovering in the hospital observed war-blind soldiers. He trained Rolf, the first dog to guide the blind. He opened a school in Munich and my father’s first guide dogs were trained by Kreimer. Kreimer came to LaSalle Kennels to assist my father. Some dogs understood their commands in German only.”

His Master’s Eyes Institute was nonprofit and supplied fully trained guide dogs to blind people of any age, race or religious background, free of charge. Sinykin’s most well-known client was a blind senator from Minneapolis, Thomas Schall (1878-1935). When he passed away in 1935, his guide dog Rex stood beside his casket at the Minnesota Capitol. Schall’s first service dog had died two years earlier, Lux, and was an official page of the U.S. Senate. As President Calvin Coolidge observed in 1928, “Lux was the first visitor I have had in over seven years that did not want anything.”

As Marvin Sinykin said of his father’s legacy, eventually by law, guide dogs traveled on trains, and eventually on Northwest Airlines. When Sen. Schall traveled between his Lake Harriet home and Washington, D.C., he was unhappy that Lux rode in the baggage compartment. In 1926, Schall co-sponsored legislation that allowed guide dogs to travel on interstate trains with their blind companion. John Sinykin himself observed in 1959: “The success of these dogs depends on how serious and sincere the people are who work with them. Those who accept the responsibility of the dogs must work constantly. Their job is never done.”

John Sinykin worked until age 92 and died a year later. We might think of his words and vision for service dogs as a tribute to Melissa Hortman, her family and their beloved dog, Gilbert.

Miigwech to the late Marvin Sinykin for a memorable interview in 2006, and for sharing with Frankie and me the family scrapbook he kept about his father’s life’s work.

Brenda J. Child is the Northrop Professor of American Studies and American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota and is author of “Bowwow Powwow” (MHS Press, 2018).