Meet Deanie, a lifesaving dog with 80,000 golf balls

Dec. 23—Frank Booth and his dog Deanie are getting older, and that means it's time to sell their collection of 80,000 golf balls.

Some people collect stamps, trading cards, coins. Frank Booth, who lives at hole six of the Chattahoochee Golf Club, has spent the last 15 years collecting golf balls with the help of his dog Deanie.

Now, he has an estimated 80,000 of them taking up half his garage — a garage he added to his home because he needed more room for his collection. His Mini Cooper convertible, meanwhile, is parked in the driveway under a gray tarp.

"They don't make this anymore," Booth said. "It's a 2013 Roadster with a rounded top and that was the last year they made those."

Booth's hobby — or obsession, as his wife might put it — began the day he brought Deanie home.

Deanie is a female feist, a squirrel-hunting dog that descended from terriers and has been used to hunt small game in America for hundreds of years.

George Washington described "a small feist-looking yellow cur" in his diary in 1770. Abraham Lincoln had a feist named Fido and wrote about the breed in a poem called "The Bear Hunt." Theodore Roosevelt brought home a feist, "a most absurd little dog named Skip," after a hunting trip in 1905. And a fearless feist features prominently in William Faulkner's short novel, "The Bear."

Within an hour of coming home, Deanie showed that her hunting instincts were finely tuned, but they weren't much use on the golf course — or were they?

"We got her at 8 weeks old and walked up on the golf course for our evening walk, and she ran over to a tree and treed a squirrel and had her paws on the tree and told me to shoot it," Booth said. "She did that about three times."

After realizing that her new owner was more a golfer than a hunter, she tuned her instincts accordingly.

"And 15 years later," Booth said, "I have over 80,000 golf balls in my garage."

Booth is an average golfer by his own account. He lives on a golf course, but he had never had a particular fascination with any of the sport's instruments. A person who collects coins might start collecting as a kid. Booth started collecting golf balls in retirement.

He retired as a dean at Brenau University, and that job title is partly where Deanie gets her name. Deanie is also the name of a character played by Natalie Wood in the movie, "Splendor in the Grass."

Booth is now 78 years old, and Deanie is about the same age in dog years.

"So we're calling it quits," he said. "I'm at the point now where I'm older and she's older and they've redone the golf course so there aren't as many opportunities to find balls up there."

Booth will sell his golf balls, about two-thirds in pristine condition, to refurbishing companies. He expects to fetch 2-22 cents per ball, which would net him between $1,600 and $17,600.

He wishes he didn't have to sell the balls — "they're like my children," he said — but that might have to do less with the golf balls themselves and more to do with what they represent.

Booth said he wouldn't be alive today if not for his golf ball-hunting dog Deanie.

A few years ago on an overcast day in January, after many days of rain, Booth and Deanie were going for their usual afternoon walk. Booth stepped onto a waterlogged patch of grass, slipped and broke his hip.

It was 38 degrees outside, the temperature was dropping, no one was around and Booth didn't have his cell phone.

"I couldn't do anything but lie there," he said. "Nobody was going to find me. Nobody knew I was out there. So I said, 'This is it, everybody goes out some way and this is how I'll go out.'"

He laid there in agonizing pain for over an hour, accompanied by his canine companion.

"My little dog would not leave me," he said. "She'd circle me to keep the varmints away from me, and she licked my face to get the mud and water off of me."

Deanie finally ran home to Booth's wife and led her to the golf course. She waved down a driver — she didn't have her phone, either — and told the driver to call 911.

But the emergency personnel showed up at the wrong location, a construction site at the course.

Once again, it was Deanie to the rescue.

"Deanie somehow heard them and realized that they were there to help, and she took off and ran through people's backyards and went over to where they were," Booth said. "And they looked at the report and the guy said, 'Did the report say the guy was walking a dog when he fell?' And when they said the word 'dog,' she circled once, barked once and took off and they said, 'Follow that dog.'"

Booth will sell all 80,000 of his and Deanie's golf balls in the coming days.

"There's a certain nostalgia and sadness," he said. "When you get old, you start thinking of the end and stuff like that, and so this is one of 'the end' incidents."

But even as he reflects on his mortality, he said at least his wife will be happy to have the garage back.

"Maybe now we can get two cars in here," he said.