Hucks: Creativity didn’t go to the dogs

In his three decades of service to Coeur d’Alene, no city employee was more creative than former Parks Director Doug Eastwood.

Doug was the Johnny Appleseed of city parks, creating green space with limited budgets and unlimited imagination. Doug’s creativity has limits, however. Ask his friends and family. Or his string of yellow-haired dogs with Labrador blood in them. They all answered to Smokey or Smokie, depending on the sex. Doug’s father started the trend when preteen Doug brought a shepherd-Lab mix home. “That looks like a Smokey,” Dad said.

And Smokey it was, for dog after dog. Smokey 2 was an Australian shepherd-Lab mix with golden hair. Smokie 3 was a Lab rescue dog with yellow hair, only Doug felt a small change was in order due to gender. Doug picked up Smokie 4 as an 8-week-old pup. After she died, Doug went Smokey-less for several years before a co-worker introduced him to a 4-month-old golden Lab in need of a home. However, she was already named Millie – and responded to that name. So the chain of Smokeys ended.

Such was Doug’s attachment to a uniform name for his yellow Labs that a cousin once joked with Doug’s younger daughter, Valerie, that she was lucky she wasn’t named Alicia 2, after her older sister/ DFO , SR Sunday Huckleberries. More here.