Joyce and her Critters...

The Glassnap household always had critters of one kind or another.  Grandma Eliza Glassnap always kept cats to keep the mice out of the house, and when Estella and Al moved to the Fair Street house, they did the same thing.  Joyce always wanted a dog too, but Wisconsin Avenue had so much traffic it was hard to keep dogs (or cats, for that matter) without their getting hit.  They never had good luck with their dogs for one reason or another.  They had some Easter chicks that grew into two mean roosters and a hen and they lived for years.  Wouldn’t you know they’d have long lives while her sweet little Easter bunny named Thumper only lived less than a year.  Here are pictures of some of the Glassnap pets.

TOP LEFT:  Joyce sits on the back lawn watching one of their many litters of kittens (about 1938-1940).

BOTTOM LEFT:  Joyce sits on the front porch of their Wisconsin Avenue home with Patches, her Boston Bull Terrier.  She only had him a year when he swallowed her jack ball and died (about 1943).

TOP RIGHT:  Joyce is with Gypsy, her little Cocker Spaniel pup.  She only had him a few years when someone stole him (about 1945). 

BOTTOM RIGHT:  Albert Glassnap is with Rusty who was half Cocker and half Chow.  After several years they had to destroy him because he bit everybody he could get his teeth into..  All except the women in the house.  He even bit Albert once!  Joyce was having bad luck with her dogs (about 1947).

Not all of Joyce’s pets had the distinction of having their picture taken.  Some of these included a pair of beagle pups named Longie and Shortie (guess who named them)..  Albert gave them to Clarence Voight because he liked to hunt and Joyce was too little to defend her rights at the time.  There were also: numerous cats and kittens (that either got hit by cars on the busy street or wandered off); a tadpole that almost grew into a frog and then died when he only had a stub of a tail left (Joyce gave a funeral with plenty of flowers and buried him in a grave marked with two popsicle sticks glued into a cross); a starling that she salvaged from the police massacres when they peppered the trees with their shotguns trying to get rid of them (that poor thing didn’t last but a day or so .. too much buckshot in it); a hamster on Fair Street (that about gave General McArthur, her cat, a nervous breakdown); etc.