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redriverslim
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A STORY ABOUT OLD FAMILY REDNOSE
The Old Family Rednose dogs have a lot of myth behind them. WayOutWest or others may know more about the OFRN so I would welcome any corrections if I get this wrong. But I talked to my buddy this morning who was a protégé of Bob Wallace and here is what he said. Most of the Old Family blood can be traced back to William Lightner of Louisiana and Jim Corcoran of Boston, MA. Jim Corcoran came to this country from Ireland to fight the world bare knuckle boxing champ, John L. Sullivan around the turn of the century. He stayed in Boston, MA and became a police officer, and sent for his dogs from the old country and his dogs helped start the red nosed line in the US. I believe Feely's dogs may have had a lot of Corcoran influence, and he said that Bob Wallace's dogs had a lot of Corcoran in them in the 1930's and 1940's. William Lightner stated that he could trace his line of rednose dogs back to his grandfather's dogs from before the Civil War. But Lightner did not care for the red nosed dogs he had, because he said they were too big and he liked smaller dogs. When Lightner left LA and moved to Colorado, he left his red nosed dogs with a man named Bourgeous in LA. There was a fellow named Dan McCoy from the Amarillo, TX area. He and Bob Hemphill from S. Carolina went to Bourgeous place and acquired the rednosed dogs that Lightner had left behind, and they split them up. So McCoy was breeding them in Amarillo and Hemphill in Carolina. That was it basically. It was Dan McCoy who coined the phrase "Old Family Red Nose" as kind of a marketing term and a way to distinguish him and Hemphill's dogs from everyone else. He said before that, nobody had ever heard the term Old Family Red Nose. He said Bob Wallace acquired his Rednose dogs from these old Lightner dogs that were being bred by Hemphill, to cross into his Corcoran dogs, but a lot of Bob's dogs were black nosed dogs, brindles and some blacks (as WAYOUTWEST pointed out about Old Family not all being rednosed). He also said that Bob Wallace purchased Searcy Jeff for $1,000 in 1937, which was an unheard of amount of money in 1937. He said that Wallace also searched out and acquired dogs bred off Ferguson's Centipede, that Earl Tudor had owned at one time. But Bob only used these dogs for crossing into his existing family and wasn't really trying to be an OFRN breeder. He said that by the time he met Bob Wallace in 1961, most of Bob's dogs had been turned Red/Red Nose by that time. He also said that Wallace never wanted to be known as a breeder of rednosed dogs only, and said that Bob actually wrote an article for one of the magazines back then titled. . . "there is no magic in a red nose" . . or something like that. I never knew any of that, as I always thought Bob Wallace was the Rednose Man.
I got all this from a man who knew Wallace, Lightner, Hemphill all personally. Just a little history of the Old Family Red Nose dogs that so many people are trying to find this blood. All this stuff was happening in the 40's, 50's and 60's, so it's so far removed from what was being called the Old Family Rednose that in 2015, I just don't think there is really an OLD FAMILY line anymore. I may be wrong.
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