A neighbor of a car wreck victim puts up fliers around Kyle looking for the dog that escaped from his owner’s car. (Photo by Wes Ferguson)
by WES FERGUSON
A dog named Lucky, the Postal Pup, is lost in Kyle. What he’s doing here, 55 miles away from home, is a mystery.
The only person who might have known is dead now, also under mysterious circumstances.
Lucky is no ordinary pooch. He never was content to live the usual dog’s life. For one thing, he can climb trees. He’s fond of mail carriers, too.
About nine years ago, however, he was just another stray puppy with no collar. One day Lucky came trotting up the driveway to a house in San Antonio. He stuck around, and he ended up adopting the residents of the entire neighborhood.
Those residents, in turn, adopted him. Now that he’s gone, he is missed by a good number of people.
“It’s kind of hard to talk about Lucky,” said John McElroy, a neighbor who had been Lucky’s daily jogging companion. “He’s a very friendly dog. He does not bite. He’ll basically walk up to anybody, but he’s certainly, definitely not aggressive. He’s just an extremely friendly dog.”
Lucky was last seen on the afternoon of March 11, when he was running away from the car wreck that killed his owner on Interstate 35, at FM 150. Some witnesses said Lucky’s face was bloody, and he seemed to be limping. Another witness gave a conflicting account. He said the dog appeared to be uninjured.
“I take that at face value that Lucky is still alive,” McElroy said.
For the past few weeks, McElroy and other neighbors have been calling area shelters, the police department, and even the post office to ask if anyone has seen their dog. McElroy is also offering a $250 reward. Twice, he has driven up from San Antonio to search for Lucky on the streets of Kyle.
“I need to determine whether the dog is dead along the road somewhere,” McElroy said.
Lucky is a terrier mix, and McElroy suspects there may be a little chihuahua in his lineage as well. He is black, with white front paws and a large white patch on his chest. His muzzle is turning gray, because he’s getting up there in years.
Back home in San Antonio, Lucky didn’t think twice about scaling his owner’s fence. He’d get loose and tour his neighborhood, tagging along with anybody who’d let him.
“I never knew where he was or if he was coming back here,” said Flora “Flo” Scott, who adopted Lucky as a puppy.
On one of his jaunts, the dog met McElroy.
“I’m a runner, and I run every day,” McElroy said. “And one day I was running, and the dog just happened to appear. He saw me coming and said, ‘Hey, I’m going to follow this guy.’ He followed me around and wouldn’t shake me. He followed me home and knew where I lived. Every day, he would wait for me to start my route.”
Lucky especially loved to follow the post office employees who delivered the mail. That’s how he came to be known as the Postal Pup. One letter carrier was particularly crazy about Lucky.
“Every day during her lunch break,” McElroy recalled, “she’d put the dog in her postal truck and drive down to Bill Miller’s and buy him a barbecue sandwich.”
Over the years, Lucky began to spend more and more time with an elderly woman named Beverly Murray. Eventually Murray adopted him, and she drove him everywhere on a car seat cover made especially for him. The cover said “Lucky” and was adorned with four-leaf clovers.
Murray took him on errands to get her prescriptions filled, and to appointments with her hair dresser. One Friday afternoon, though, Murray’s husband Harold came home to discover that his wife and her dog were gone.
“She wasn’t here, but his leash and her cane were here,” Harold recalled. “I thought, well that’s strange. Then I saw she had a 3 o’clock hair appointment.”
Harold assumed his wife was at the hair dresser. But at 3:30 p.m., the hair dresser called. Beverly had missed her appointment.
“That got me worried,” Harold said. “I called the San Antonio police. I wanted to see if they had any suggestions on trying to find her. They couldn’t do anything.”
Then Harold received a call from a social worker at Brackenridge Hospital in Austin. She told him that Beverly had been in a wreck in Kyle and was in critical condition. By the time he got to the hospital, his wife was dead.
No one knows why Beverly was driving north on Interstate 35 that day. Harold thought she might have been shopping at the outlet malls in San Marcos, then became disoriented and drove north instead of south. But there were no shopping bags in the car, and he has received no credit card statements indicating any purchases.
“I have no idea,” he said. “This whole thing is a mystery that will never be solved.”
He recalled Beverly as a loving wife and a nice person. She loved dogs, especially Lucky.
Harold thinks Lucky met his demise on Interstate 35.
But maybe not. Maybe he’s in Kyle, trotting behind a mail carrier. Or maybe he’s barking at a bird flying overhead, or chasing a squirrel, or sitting in the top of a tree somewhere.
If Lucky ever turns up, he’ll make his home again with Scott. Scott has plastered fliers all over Kyle asking for any information about Lucky’s whereabouts.
“He’s a very exceptional dog,” she said. “I wish you could have seen him climb the trees after those squirrels.”
