on the cover / By Jay Aubrey-Herzog

Battle for Boomer Jack

The adorable hound has inspired books and screenplays. Is a lawsuit next?

(May 31, 2007) IT ALL STARTED WITH A DOG.

Lincoln Kilian says he originally unearthed the story of Boomer Jack sorting through clippings in his job as an HSU librarian, a job he’d had since 1966. In 1977, he was transferred to the Humboldt Room, which houses the library’s special historical collections. Part of his assignment in the Humboldt Room at the library was to maintain the pamphlet files. In those files he found an undated story from a defunct local paper about a stray dog that rode railroad trains. He showed it to his then-boss, Erich Schimps, who at the time thought it would make a nice children’s book.

“Boomer Jack” N.W.P. Mascot, c. 1916. Photo from Lincoln Kilian’s “A Dog’s Life,” courtesy of Robert Brantley to the author.

GALLERY >

Kilian was intrigued. He was drawn into a search for the true story of this mysterious dog, tracking down one of the old-timers quoted in the story, Reggie St. Louis, who was ailing but still alive, in his late 70s. St. Louis also gave Kilian the names of several other locals who might know more about the legendary hobo dog, who was called Boomer Jack, or Hobo Jack, or Bummer Jack.

Kilian’s obsession with the story was cemented when a train conductor’s widow produced a photo of Boomer Jack’s funeral, a picture where none of the men were identified. It then became in Kilian’s own words, “an intense personal mission” to discover the true story. For months he tracked down old railroad workers throughout Northern California, many in their 80s and 90s, eliciting memories of the peripatetic hound and his travels.

The more he learned, the more he had the feeling that he had uncovered what he called “an all-but-forgotten folk hero.”

Eventually he made his way down to Willits, which was the central stop on Boomer Jack’s run. Thanks to the tip from a local newspaper staff, he found a former Northwest Pacific Railroad man named Bob Brown who remembered Boomer Jack. Brown drove Kilian to the rail yard and pointed out the locale of Jack’s resting place, a landscape which precisely matched the line of hills in the funeral photo. After completing this last part of the puzzle, Kilian finished his book, and the Mendocino County Museum published A Dog’s Life: the Story of Boomer Jack in 1998. Right before publication, Kilian acquired an agent to sell the movie rights thanks to the intercession of his ex-wife. He was elated. His book eventually went through several printings, first selling at the museum bookstore, but eventually landing in other outlets through Kilian’s persistence.

Earlier this year, a different telling of Boomer Jack’s story appeared — this one a story for children. Writer Tim Martin’s fictionalized The Legend of Boomer Jack shares several historical incidents with Kilian’s historical booklet, and the private fight over who has the right to tell the dog’s story that’s been building for some time has finally gone public.

Both Kilian and Tim Martin agree that the rift between them was sparked when they met while doing something they both love — running. (Tim Martin’s earlier books, and a regular newspaper column in the Times-Standard, are about that subject.) In 1997, Kilian ran into Martin at the annual Patrick’s Point Run. Kilian says he knew Martin was also a fellow writer, and had a friendly acquaintance with him, so he excitedly shared the news of the publication of his upcoming historical booklet. He says he told Martin of how he “spent a couple of years working on the story of this railroad dog I discovered. I told him about all the work I did, running around tracking down sources.” Remembering that he’d read that Martin was working on a screenplay, he also mentioned that he himself had acquired an agent for a possible movie sale. “I remember Tim specifically saying, `Wow, you’re really lucky. Movie rights these days start at $100,000. You could really get a lot of money out of this.’”

1 2 3 4 5 6 NEXT PAGE >SHARE