In 1940, my grandparents, Louis and Celia Altberger, were living in a one-bedroom apartment in Denver’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. My mom had married the previous year and was living in Pueblo with my dad.
Louis, always the man with the big ego, came home one day with a puppy in his arms. What the hell is that? Asked my grandmother.
It’s a Doberman puppy and she’s going to be a great champion.
We have no room for her.
Yes, we do. I bought her a house.
They moved to the house a few weeks later and the dog, Tessie, had free run of the neighborhood and the small airfield across the way. She was glorious and she did become a champion. Tessie lived a good life. She self-exercised by chasing geese at Stapleton, the airport that was so close. There were no gates that surrounded the fields, no leash laws. She was big, strong, and beautiful. She was the pride of my grandfather, stealing his heart and gaining his full attention.
My parents moved back to Denver after my brother was born in 1943. They chose a home close to my grandparents. It was convenient because my dad would join the war effort. When I was about three, my parents bought a larger house in Park Hill, just a mile from my grandparents. My best friend was Tessie who spent every day running back and forth between the two homes.
Tessie died before my fourth birthday. Of course, I can’t remember what happened, but I do know that for years afterwards, the family talked about Tessie as though she were a saint. There wasn’t a Passover when the family didn’t begin telling stories about her. The time she waited for a burglar to break into Louis’ house and then attacked him, ripping his pants as he fled the house. Louis, hearing the commotion, grabbed his gun and went to Tessie, standing alert with pants material in her mouth. Or the time her pups died ad she began burying them. Or the time she laid peacefully with me while I slept on the floor. My dad mounted her photo and her ribbons on a felt board and it hung in our basement in Park Hill. When we moved to Crestmoor Park, the memorial went with us and hung in the basement there. When my dad died and mom moved to an apartment, the memorial came to live with GB and me.
Everything about Tessie reminds me of my childhood spent in Park Hill. It was a childhood filled with the freedom to play unsupervised and unafraid; a childhood, at least for me, filled with dogs, horses, the undying love of my grandfather, and the distant memories of a dog who ran in the fields of a small-town airport.
The fields where Tessie spent her time away from the show ring and her babysitting duties were replaced by runways which were later demolished to make way for a gigantic urban transformation of the land. That land, now known as Central Park, is filled with homes, town centers, parks, dog parks, a nursing home, light rail that services downtown and the new, bigger, better airport, medical and dental offices, shopping, flower shops, open air markets, grocery stores, apartments, and 55+ apartment complexes. So, when GB and I decided where to move, we chose to live few yards from where Tessie ran free.
Air. 
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