WAYLON FINDS A WAY
Rejected for service canine role, ‘dollar dog’ still had a lifetime of helping
Afew months after they had given up the dog they’d raised as a puppy, Bill Von Drasek and Debbie Tomasik got a call they never expected.
Waylon, the golden retriever, who they had left with Michigan-based service dog organization so he could assist someone with special needs, was coming back home.
But it wasn’t because Waylon couldn’t cut it as a service dog.
“He was very solid,” Von Drasek said. “We didn’t think we’d ever see him come back again. You know that going in.”
Von Drasek and Tomasik, who live in Oak Forest, had done their part to see that Waylon had a good start. As foster puppy raisers for Paws With a Cause, they started his training early.
“You introduce them to all kinds of environments, bringing them to the mall, taking them to restaurants, on the train and buses,” Von Drasek said. “You do all the kinds of things a service dog would actually experience.”
They’d been at it for 14 months before they had to return him to Michigan for even more rigorous training, including weeks with the person who would be his eventual partner.
“Waylon was our first one. He was so good,” Von Drasek said. “It was very emotional. We had really bonded. You do everything with the dog, they go everywhere with you. You go to the store, and they come along wearing a service dog in training vest. And one day you have to let them go. It’s difficult. You’re doing something good for others — you have to look at it that way.”
Then they got the call. “He had a medical condition,” Von Drasek said, an autoimmune disease. “They can’t pair a dog with a medical problem with somebody with a medical problem. So they called us and we got him back.
“We didn’t know if it was a disease that would be fatal; we weren’t sure what the outcome would be.”
Waylon came home with swollen lymph nodes.
“He had golf ball-sized bumps all over him, and when he came back we got a medical file that was a half-inch thick from the University of Michigan,” Von Drasek said.
After a year’s worth of visits to specialists and a regimen of high-strength immune repressive drugs, Waylon’s canine reactive histiocytosis went into remission. It was time to get to work. “Once it cleared up, we figured we have to do something with him because he was so good,” Von Drasek said. “He was brought up as a service dog, and he loved to work and do things.”
Von Drasek started training him for agility competitions, and Tomasik, a schoolteacher, started bringing him occasionally to visit classes for reading programs.
They enrolled Waylon in Dog Scouts of America, a Michigan-based training program.
“It’s just like Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts,” Von Drasek said, “where they have merit badges and that kind of thing.”
One of the badges Waylon earned, which likely isn’t offered for his human Scout counterparts, was for panhandling. It was a skill that would endear him to people throughout the Chicago area and make him nearly legendary at nonprofit events.
Waylon and his owners would go to fundraising events for animal shelters such as PAWS Tinley Park, the South Suburban Humane Society, and veterans organizations such as
Honor Flight Chicago. And Waylon would put his panhandling skills to use, collecting dollars from people and dropping them into a bucket.
“At some of these events, he was the only dog so he would always grab attention,” Von Drasek said. “Everybody loves a dog, and they all would come to see the dog. They were crazy about giving him dollars, and they’d keep on giving him dollars, and he would just work nonstop. He was really driven. Of course, he got a treat so he was rewarded.
“Sometimes he would see people walking by with a pamphlet, and he would think it was a dollar and grab it out of their hands.”
A recent social media post from PAWS Tinley Park recalled a dinner dance fundraiser where Waylon “very carefully removed a $20 bill from an unsuspecting man awaiting a drink at the bar.”
“Luckily, he was a very good sport!” the post stated.
According to PAWS, Waylon’s antics would thrill the crowd and were an irreplaceable service. They dubbed him “the Wonderdog.”
Sometimes he would wear a dog tuxedo, and at one Roaring ’20sthemed event, he dressed as a gangster holding a cigar.
“He did have a fan base,” Von Drasek said. “People would look for him. One year, we couldn’t go and people asked, ‘where is the dollar dog?’ as they called him.”
When he wasn’t collecting money for good causes, Waylon could be found winning Iron Dog competitions — Von Drasek said he won first place four or five years in a row at an annual meet at a forest preserve in Oak Forest — or at area schools, where he would help Tomasik teach a program about different jobs dogs can do, such as police work and, of course, being service animals.
And he loved spending summers swimming at their cabin in Michigan. He had a Dog Scout merit badge for that, too: dock diving.
“He loved the water,” he said. “He would run to the water and stay in it from sunup too sundown. He would just go back and forth swimming and looking for things, picking up sticks and bottles that sunk to the bottom.
“We would kayak with him along the water, and if he saw a bottle he would go down and pick it up, so we did some environmental cleanup.”
Waylon retired from his panhandling gigs a couple years ago after his final public appearance, a PAWSsponsored retirement party at Palos Country Club when he was 12.
“We didn’t want to push him,” Von Drasek said. “He was getting old, and it can be a little stressful. We just wanted to give him a good retirement.”
So after more than a decade of service, Waylon got to spend a couple years swimming and relaxing.
Last September, Waylon started suffering seizures. Von Drasek said they got them under control and “he was back swimming and running.” But then a week before Christmas “it went downhill quickly,” and Waylon died at age 14 and 8 months.
“I was hoping he would hit 15 and he would have another summer of swimming in Michigan,” Von Drasek said.
But as a golden retriever, he had a long life.
“Anytime they get past age 10, every year is a blessing,” he said. “He was a good dog who had a good, long life.”
Waylon’s story ended as all of ours must, but in troubled times it’s helps to share a story of good.
And Waylon was a very good boy indeed.