When watching ‘The Christmas Story" featuring Ralphie and his family, we all laughed so hard at the Bumpuses horrible hound dogs. In our neighborhood in Libertyville, Illinois, we had the Weimer’s dogs but no one was laughing.
The street we lived on had few houses on acreage on our side of the street while the other side had houses built on smaller plots of land. One of these houses was semi-finished and lived in by a German husband and wife, the Weimer’s. The house was really just a small shell with a flat roof with no electricity. The neighbors often wondered how they stayed warm and dry during the horrible winters. There was some gossip that they were somehow related to WWII and my grandmother was convinced that they were former Nazi’s.
They never had children. They had dogs. They had a pack of dogs. The neighbors were always scared when the dogs escaped their fenced yard. Many a time, I would scramble up a tree to escape their thrashing jaws trying to bite me. Everyone was afraid of them.
Mrs. Weimer had died years earlier when one of the neighbors realized that his curtains were not opened. Apparently, Mr. Weimer would open them every morning and they had not moved in days.
They called the police.
We arrived to the scene on our way home from school. I remember watching a police officer vomiting in their front yard. Mr. Weimer had died in his bed days earlier and the dogs had mauled and partially devoured him. They were all shot by the police as they turned to attack them.
The small plot of land was split between the neighbors on either side and the house was demolished. Erased. It was if they had never existed.
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