Delmer, the Secretariat of greyhounds: He was fast. And goofy. And now he's gone.
The first time I laid eyes on Delmer, his name wasn’t Delmer.
It was Slatex Exxon, one of the Slatex line of racing greyhounds that had a reputation for being very fast and very, well, you’ll see. Just a guess, but perhaps the oil giant had bought his naming rights, as if he were a football stadium or college bowl game or something.
I met him for the first time in the backyard of a woman’s house north of Harrisburg, just as he had come off the track.
At that time, my ex-wife and I had Lester, a very neurotic greyhound with OCD. We had just lost Lester’s companion, Norman, and Lester needed another greyhound to keep him company and tell him what to do. Lester was like that.
As we looked for another greyhound, we got in touch with the woman who ran Keystone Greyhounds, and she told us that they were getting several dogs from a track in Wheeling, West Virginia, one Saturday and we were welcome to come up and meet the dogs to see whether any of them would be a fit for Lester.
We got there before the dogs arrived, and when the van backed up to the gate in the fence surrounding the woman’s backyard, they opened the back, and this dog sprang from the van. He sprinted across the yard, full speed, and ran head-first into the wooden fence. He fell and then got right back up, walking around the yard as if nothing had happened.
I thought, “That’s the dog.”
We took him home that day.
A canine version of Secretariat
He met Lester and they seemed to get along. Lester was excited to see him, but Delmer wasn’t too impressed. Delmer checked out the yard and then the house, finding the couch and lying down, twisting onto his back with his feet pointed at the ceiling. He was home.
He was christened Delmer, after the character in the Coen Brothers film “Oh Brother, Where Art Thou.” Like the character, he was, shall we say, not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but, again like his namesake, he was sweet. (For background, my first greyhound was named Homer, after either Homer Simpson or the Greek poet. Norman, the smartest greyhound to ever live, was named for Norman Einstein - see below - and Lester for either legendary guitarist Les Paul or bluegrass great Lester Flatt.)
Delmer was the fourth greyhound to come into my life. First was Homer, who never raced. When I checked his racing record, he didn’t have one, so I called his home track in Connecticut and wound up talking to a trainer who said he remembered Homer. His first race, he bolted from the gate and when he saw the people in the stands, he ran to the rail and started jumping up and down, wagging his tail so hard that it knocked him over.
After Homer died of osteosarcoma – an affliction that is fairly common in greyhounds – along came Norman. Norman was too smart to race. It seemed that he thought the notion of chasing a mechanical rabbit around a track was stupid. He loved bread and one morning, I walked into the kitchen to find him standing on the kitchen counter munching a loaf of bread. How he got up there was anybody’s guess. He was named Norman because a while back, during an NFL broadcast, former quarterback and announcer Joe Theismann was disputing the idea that a certain coach was a genius. He said, “A genius is someone like Norman Einstein.”
Then, there was Lester. Lester never raced because he seemed too neurotic to do so. He had a short attention span and OCD – he couldn’t walk around a room without touching his nose to a stereo speaker or a pile of books on the coffee table or whatever.
Delmer was the first greyhound I’ve had who ever raced. And he was good at it, sort of. I found a YouTube video of one of his races where he bolted from the gate, taking the lead. By the end of the race, there was barely another dog in the frame. It was like watching a canine version of Secretariat. I looked up his racing record and he had run about 100 races. The record had a section describing his performance and Delmer’s was mixed. He either won the race or did not finish after running into another dog and falling down. Made sense.
He and Lester got along. Well, Lester got along with him. Delmer seemed to tolerate Lester. He pretty much ignored Lester in the house. In the yard, at least when he was younger, Delmer would run in a circle, carving an oval shaped dirt track in the grass. Lester would try to run after him but couldn’t keep up. Lester would then try to cut him off and Delmer would just reverse course and run the other way. After a while, Lester would just stand aside and watch Delmer run. They would play and goof around in the yard. When Delmer had enough and wanted to come in the house, I had to make sure to be there to open the sliding glass door as he ran onto the deck. If I didn’t, he’d run head-first into the door.
In the house, they seemed like roommates. They would lie on the couch together, one at each end of the couch, Lester lying normally and Delmer on his back with his feet in the air.
The smartest greyhound in the world?
After my marriage dissolved, I got custody of Lester and Delmer. We’d go to Rocky Ridge County Park and hike the trails and take walks, Lester walking beside me as Delmer weaved back and forth and pulled on the leash. When we’d encounter other people and their dogs, Lester was kind of wary. Delmer wanted to meet them and be friends. He would seem to get upset when other dogs didn’t take to him.
As the years passed, Delmer mellowed. He would trot around the yard, but he seemed to have had enough of running. He was content to lie on the couch and do nothing. Sometimes, I had to check to see whether he was still breathing.
Just about two years ago, Lester got sick – cancer. He died in November 2020.
I thought about getting another greyhound to keep Delmer company, but as the weeks turned into months, it seemed Delmer was happy being the only dog in the house.
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When I’d recline on the couch to watch TV or read, he would climb next to me, lying kind of beside me, on my legs, resting his head on my thigh and gazing at me the same way he looked at me when I was eating pizza and he knew a crust was coming his way. Sometimes, he’d climb on top of me, which wasn’t as cute as you’d think it would be, seeing as he was 75 pounds of bone and muscle. I’d say a bad word or two and ask him to get off me, but he would just gaze at me, with a kind of puzzled look on his face. It was the same kind of expression he had when I would periodically ask him, “Who’s the smartest greyhound in the world?” He’d always look at me quizzically, his expression saying, “I don’t know.”
He was a loving dog. Dogs, generally speaking, are like that, just full of unconditional love for the human beings who give them food and a couch to sleep on for 23 hours a day. (The late, great comic Norm MacDonald did a bit about this, pointing out that Hitler had a dog who loved him.) Delmer was very affectionate and would lie on the couch gazing at me like I was his whole world. His favorite thing was when I'd rub his ears and he’d groan in ecstasy, something called an “eargasm” in greyhound circles.
A few weeks ago, Delmer got a lump on his neck, which became swollen. I got him to the vet, who examined him and delivered the bad news. Delmer had lymphoma. At his age, there wasn’t a lot they could do. I remember the vet asking me whether he had been more lethargic lately. I replied, “It’s kind of hard to tell.”
His last trip to the vet was Sept. 23. He was 12.
It's what you sign up for
As much as I told myself – and others who asked about him – that this is what you sign up for when you get a dog, it was hard. As he lay on the blanket on the floor of the examining room at the vet’s office, I told him I loved him and that I was sorry.
It seems very strange now. For years, Delmer would wake me at 2 or 3 every morning, wanting to go out. If I ignored him, he’d leave a surprise for me on the floor.
The last few days, I’ve been waking up in the single digit hours, expecting to hear him outside my bedroom door, his nails clicking on the wooden floor as he paced back and forth past the door.
But there’s nothing but silence.
Columnist/reporter Mike Argento has been a York Daily Record staffer since 1982. Reach him at mike@ydr.com.
This article originally appeared on York Daily Record: Delmer was a champion greyhound racer. In retirement, he was a goof.
