Dennis McCoy – Ad In Newspaper Leads To An Amazing Career

BY AMY FERNANDEZ

From the archives of The Canine Chronicle, October, 2016

How does a successful accountant from Buffalo find himself in the BIS ring at Westminster wearing pink socks no less? No, he didn’t wake up vowing to swear off spicy curry dinners. It’s one of many strange episodes in a career that Dennis McCoy admits he never expected.

It started with the straightforward motivation shared by millions of dog lovers.

“I had received a trust fund when I turned 21 and the one thing I always wanted was a dog. I was going to college in Buffalo and living at home with my mom at the time and she said I could only have a dog that didn’t shed. I thought that limited my choice to Poodles or Schnauzers,” he says.

It’s hard to envision Dennis McCoy as a blockbuster Schnauzer handler, but it almost happened. “I saw an ad in the paper for Poodles. It was nearby and when I called I was told they [the poodles] had come all the way from the Midwest. I thought WOW they must be valuable. That’s how I got Peppy.” Next stop, Sears pet department. “There I met a lady who had apricot Miniature Poodles. She asked if my new puppy was a show dog. I had no idea,” he says. Then again, Peppy was imported from the Midwest. McCoy continues, “I went home and got him.” She told him a couple things. Peppy was shortchanged on testicles and there was a local match show coming up that weekend. “I went to my very first dog show the next Sunday. I was completely hooked from the start.”

There are two things fired-up novices setting out to buy their first show dog have in common. It’s an endless source of great stories and no one ever forgets those harsh lessons about dog business realities. “That trust fund was burning a hole in my pocket,” Dennis laughs. By the end of that summer, after a couple of false starts, Dennis had his first show dog. Things settled down for awhile. Along with graduating and finding a nice job, he finished the dog in Canada, won a specialty, and made progress toward its AKC title. Going to more shows, meeting more people in the breed…“then I de- cided I wanted another dog,” he says.

Eventually, he sent both dogs to Barbara Humphries, one of several Poodle experts he learned from that year. There was lots to learn, like remembering to brush the dog. “I had let my dog get totally matted so I called Richard Bauer asking what to do. He told me to use corn starch. I thought ‘Really’. So I took a day off work, plopped my grooming table down in the middle of my mother’s living room, started with the corn starch and worked diligently to get the mats out. I had just about finished when my mother came home from work,” he says. She wasn’t quite as pleased with his accomplishment. “She walked in the house and from one end to the other the whole downstairs was white.”

At that point, Dennis’s Poodle project was expanding faster than his mom’s patience.

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Posted by Alex on Oct 1 2020. Filed under Current Articles, Dog Show History, Featured. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.