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He won many awards including the National Headliners Club award for writing the best local interest column in the country in 1962. In 1977 his fellow Tri-State Journalists honored him with with the first Distinguished Service Award. He is the author of five book: A Pig In The Gray Panel Truck, A Dandelion in Winter, Day of a President, Just a 100 Miles From Home, and The Journey in the Red Jalopy. He worked for newspapers in Santa Fe, N.M., Monett, MO, Beckley WV, and Memphis, TN. He began working for the Evansville Courier in 1957. Aaron was born in Cone, Texas and reared on a farm in Portales, NM. He attented the University of New Mexico where he graduated with honors with a degree in journalism.
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by Joe Aaron Bernice met me at the door and there were tears in her eyes. I could tell that she had been crying for a long time.
”Jobe is dead,” she told me. “He died this afternoon.”
I stood there and studied her dumbly for a long time, not knowing what to say.
”He can’t be dead,” I said at last. “He wasn’t even sick.”
And I went out to the side porch where he lay covered with a sack to keep the dismal rain off him.
I stooped down and scratched his ears and talked to him, as I always do, and for the first time in all the happy years since he came as a tiny puppy to live with us he failed to respond.
I knew then that he was dead, for Jobe, more than any other dog I have ever known, was responsive to attention, and there was simply no limit to his love for us.
I went back into the house and wandered aimlessly around the living room, trying to get used to the idea that he was dead.
Why, it was only yesterday that I had sat on the porch steps and he had climbed onto my lap and licked my ears, as he always did.
And I petted him and scratched his ears – and instead of wagging just his tail, as most dogs do, he wagged his entire rear end.
”I guess I’d better go bury him,” I said at last.
But just then Bruce and Russ, these young pals of mine who live down the road, knocked at the door and said they would bury him for me.
They took the shovel out of the garage and lifted Jobe’s furry little body and gently carried him off across the low field behind the house, and on the high spot in the corner where the tree is, they buried him beneath the lowering April skies and put a marker on his grave.
”Fold the sack over him,” I said, “so he won’t get dirt in his face.”
Not that it mattered, I suppose, but I felt better that he wouldn’t have dirt in his face.
Then I spent the rest of the evening listening for his restless sounds on the porch, and his protective barking at passing cars.
And deep in the night I awakened to hear the merciless rain on the roof, and I thought of Jobe in his new grave.
He was as fine and dedicated a watchdog as ever lived, Jobe was. He barked at everything – at cats and birds and scudding leaves, at shadows and slamming doors and the ringing telephone – but he had a different kind of bark, more authoritative somehow, when strange people came around, and we could always tell.
No strange dog was ever too big or mean for him to challenge – and I’ve often seen him send some big ones yelping frantically down the road when they made the innocent mistake of cutting across our yard.
He knew his job and he did it splendidly.
only once that I know about was he ever beaten – and that, of all peculiar and unfair things, was by a nesting duck.
I don’t know how it happened, but he got his tail caught in a barbed wire fence one night, with two wires twisted around it – and that miserable duck flogged him at her leisure, all night long.
I heard him whimpering when I got up the next morning, and I cut him free with a pair of pliers. He ran about 85 miles an hour to the house and didn’t venture off the porch all day long.
He never did have a whole lot of use for ducks after that, and I’ll have to confess that it sort of prejudiced me against them too.
Wary of all strangers, Jobe had an all-consuming, touchingly protective love for Bernice and me, and for our children and our grandchildren – and he was blessed with a forgiving heart.
One minute I could bellow that I was going to systematically beat his brains out if he didn’t shut up and the next, with the slightest flicker of encouragement from me, he would come sailing into my lap, wagging all over and exuberantly licking me in the face.
he never held a grudge, al lot more than I can say of most people I know, and he was as gentle as a nursemaid with tiny children.
And I shall see him for a long, long time, in the eye of my memory, running, gleeful circles around the car, then around our ankles, when we got home after a mere 30-minute trip to town.
If only we could always be greeted with such enthusiasm when we have been gone and return again. If only we could.
Sleep gently, little fella, sleep gently.
