Secret Service Dogs by Maria Goodavage

Author:Maria Goodavage
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-10-06T13:31:33+00:00

CHAPTER 11

DRIVE

The Secret Service goes shopping for dogs in Denver, Indiana, population 471. It’s an eleven-hour drive from RTC when pulling a ten-dog trailer. That’s with just one quick stop and no traffic, and doesn’t include getting stuck behind a horse and carriage.

A couple of the smaller roads that lead to Denver go through Northern Indiana Amish country. Scenic, yes, but to have to slow to five miles an hour when the canine selection team is so close to its destination can be painful. It’s even worse when heading back to D.C. with a trailer full of barking dogs at the beginning of the trip.

“It may be for only two miles, but two miles behind a horse is forever,” says Secret Service canine program instructor Steve M., who makes the trip every few months.

Denver is home to Vohne Liche Kennels, which has provided most of the Secret Service canines since the year 2000. Kenneth (Kenny) Licklider, who started Vohne Liche in 1993 after retiring from the Air Force, says the kennel has trained and/or provided dogs for more than five thousand agencies, including U.S. Army Special Forces and U.S. Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command (MARSOC).

During the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the kennels were often at near capacity. With almost six hundred dogs in the seven kennel buildings, Denver had more dogs than people for a while, and some months it still comes close.

Denver is just a couple of miles away from the larger town of Mexico. But Peru, about five miles south, is the place where most of the Secret Service instructors who select dogs go to eat and spend the night.

Peru, with a population of about 11,200, is the biggest city in Miami County. If you’re a local of a certain age, you may still be pronouncing it pee-roo. It’s no metropolis but it has a past more storied than many cities several times its size.

Depression-era gangster John Dillinger and his gang plundered weapons from a police arsenal in Peru in 1933. The deputies watched dumbstruck as the men ransacked their gun cabinets and made away with a variety of powerful weapons they’d soon use in deadly bank robberies.

In 1972 the ransom from an American Airlines hijacking was found by a farmer tending a soybean field. Another farmer, this one in a corn field, found a submachine gun used in the hijacking.

If that’s not colorful enough, Peru is also the self-proclaimed “Circus Capital of the World.”

“Children in Peru learn circus skills the way other kids learn soccer,” notes an article in USA Today, which also informs that Peru is “where human cannonball is a prestigious occupation.”

From the late 1890s until the 1940s, a half-dozen professional circuses, including Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey, chose Peru as a place to spend winters because of its relatively central location and proximity to railroads. When they eventually pulled up stakes for good, they left behind a circus-oriented population.

Today Peru is home to the International Circus Hall of Fame Museum, the Circus City Festival and Parade, a youth circus, and the Peru Amateur Circus.

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