How Seven Swamps Got Its Name

 Like I said, it looked like the whole site had been a swamp at one time, and somebody had started filling it in but never completed the project.  There were some unfilled potholes scattered around the site, which I suppose looked like swamps to the city kids who hung out there.  There might have been seven of them originally, but we only found five.  

I seem to remember taking my dogs to that big prairie near 55th Street one time.  Somebody had told me about it and we went to check it out.  The cover was pretty sparse, we didn't run any rabbits, and my dogs picked up a bunch of ticks while we were there.  As Ann Landers used to say, "The sample was ample."

I'm sure I told you guys about this before, but there was a big field on the corner of 51st and California where kids used to play ball.  There were two diamonds, one for softball and one for league ball, with regular backstops but no bleachers.  It wasn't really a prairie because the grass was kept mowed and there was a tall cyclone fence around it.  There was no sign or anything, but everybody called it Farmer's Field.  This is where my two beagles got their obedience training before I could trust them off the leash.  We would go there early in the morning when we had the place to ourselves.  I would close the gate before I loosed the hounds, so there was no trouble they could get themselves into.  

The only thing they had to learn was to come to me when I called them.  The first time I tried the old rope trick, you call them and then pull them in on a rope.  That didn't work, the rope got all tangled and it just confused the dogs.  Then I let them run loose for awhile while I sat on the ground untangling the rope.  Soon the dogs got tired of chasing each other around and came over to see what I was doing.  As soon as they turned my way I started blowing on a police whistle, and I kept blowing it until the dogs were in my lap.  Then I gave each of them a small Milk Bone dog biscuit. The trick is to blow the whistle more softly the closer the dogs get to you because dogs have sensitive ears and you don't want the experience to be unpleasant for them.  Dogs learn by repetition, so we practiced that drill over and over again until those guys would drop whatever they were doing and run straight to me whenever I blew that whistle.  

This came in handy when we were hunting for real with my father and his friends.  I had previously seen other guys bring dogs out there that had never been off a leash outside of their house or back yard.  All that open space must have overwhelmed them because they would just run and run, impervious to the commands of their owner, who now had to spend the rest of the day trying to catch his dog instead of the rabbits and pheasants they came there for in the first place.