A birthday party is planned in West Plains Monday for one very special dog.
On March 10, 1925, Jim, a Llewellyn setter was born, the runt of the litter, in Louisiana. His human companion Sam VanArsdale got the pup for half price and brought him to West Plains when he was just a few months old.
"Sam lived in West Plains, Missouri a hotel, it's since gone, the Arcade Hotel in downtown West Plains, and so Sam brought Jim to live with him at the Arcade," said Terry Hampton, who works at the Ozark Heritage Welcome Center in West Plains.
She said, three years later, the VanArsdale family moved to Marshall, Missouri where, today, Jim – who became known as Jim the Wonder Dog -- has his own museum.
That’s because, as Hampton puts it, he had skills that were mindboggling.
"Jim was actually an astounding hunting dog. Apparently, (he) was not interested in learning traditional training skills, just knew by instinct how to hunt birds," said Hampton. But Sam — the first thing he knew that something was up is he said to Jim, let's go set under, I think it was a hickory tree, a specific kind of tree. 'Let's go sit under this hickory tree because it's kind of hot,' and Jim went directly to the hickory tree, and Sam noticed and he was, like, 'huh?' Well, let's go to the oak tree,' and Jim went to the oak tree and so on."
Hampton said the canine received national attention in Reader’s Digest, major newspapers and Ripley’s Believe it or Not.
Jim could locate a car by make, color, out-of-state plate or license number, according to the Jim the Wonder Dog Museum. And, from a crowd, he could identify the “man who sells hardware” or the “one who takes care of sick people.” He followed commands given to him in foreign languages, shorthand and Morse Code. And he chose the winner of seven Kentucky Derbies, the World Series and the sex of unborn babies.
"They even took him to the University of Missouri at Columbia, and the veterinarian school, the professors there, apparently put him through his paces, a lot of other faculty members did," said Hampton. "They would ask him questions in multiple languages like, you know, 'where is the little girl in the red dress?' for example, and he would go stand by the little girl in the red dress."
In 2017, the Missouri Legislature declared Jim an official state symbol -- “Missouri’s Wonder Dog.”
Hampton is a Jim the Wonder Dog super fan.
"I guess there's something in me that really wants to believe in things that don't have an explanation and things that are really special, said Hampton, and everyone that had any kind of interaction with Jim seems to believe that there was just something special going on."
Hampton has organized a 100th birthday party for Jim on Monday (3/10) at the Ozark Heritage Welcome Center in West Plains, complete with cupcakes. She hopes maybe those with direct ties to Jim will stop by. And she said they’ll have gifts for guests’ own special pups if they share stores about them. She worked at the West Plains Gazette in the 1980s when they published an article by Henry N. Ferguson about Jim the Wonder Dog, and copies of it will be available. The celebration gets underway at 11.
