Man's Best Friend or City's Favorite Scapegoat?

It has often been pointed out that dog is God spelled backward and vice versa. Will Rogers once opined, "If there are no dogs in Heaven, then when I die I want to go where they went." Thirty-two of the forty-four presidents of the United States had dogs, and all but George Washington's seven dogs lived in the White House. (The executive mansion had not yet been completed when Washington was President.) Dogs are held in high regard in this country but not in Hudson--at least not by some.

One of the misanthropes when it comes to dogs is Glenn Martin, former chief of the Hudson Police Department who retired in 2000 under a cloud, after being accused of falsifying department records by indicating on his activity sheets that he had been working in the police station when he was in fact somewhere else. At the end of last night's Common Council meeting, Martin, identifying himself as a taxpayer and a "person of faith," declared that he was "disturbed" by what happened in the Common Council. He soon segued to his real topic: dogs in the cemetery--indeed dogs anywhere in Hudson. He outed himself as a reader of The Gossips of Rivertown and a lurker on the Hudson Community Board Facebook page by complaining about what he called "Where's Waldo?" games in the cemetery and railing against the prospect of people visiting the cemetery, which he called "hallowed ground," to view the funerary art found therein.

Martin mentioned with indignation the spoof "Wanted" posters that appeared on Facebook and Gossips last week in the wake of the mayor's ban on dogs in the cemetery and expressed outrage that someone would admit to training for marathons by running with her dog in the cemetery. 

In addition to wanting dogs and people who had no loved ones buried in the cemetery banned from that sacred place, Martin seemed intent on nipping the dog park initiative in the bud. He distributed information to the aldermen and urged them to consider the danger "for people and the community" of having a dog park. He also claimed that only 1 percent of the people in Hudson owned dogs, presumably trying to make a connection between the "elitist" dog owners of Hudson and the super rich in America, and intimated that a dog park should not be created to serve such a small percentage of the population.

Mayor William Hallenbeck then rose to "echo Mr. Martin's sentiments." Hallenbeck's comments though were limited to dogs in the cemetery. He wanted to know why the five people who appeared in a picture posted on Facebook, posing with their dogs in the cemetery, with the mayor's house in the background, were not there at the meeting. Alderman John Friedman (Third Ward) responded, "They don't have to be. We represent them."

Hallenbeck reported that Gail Grandinetti, who works in the cemetery office, told him a family, after purchasing their sixth plot, returned to the office to complain that they had seen feces, presumably dog feces, on their loved ones' graves.

Responding to the mayor, Friedman argued that the real problems in the cemetery were not dogs and their alleged desecration of graves but crumbling and toppled tombstones, dying and badly pruned trees, and people who drive too fast through the cemetery, exceeding the 12 mile an hour limit. He took issue with Martin's claim that the cemetery was sacred and hallowed ground, asserting that Cedar Park and the Hudson City Cemetery were public cemeteries. His frustration mounting, Friedman concluded, "Stupid Council, stupid town government." At some point during Friedman's polemic, Martin stormed out of the room.

Gossips Note: What Gossips heard Friedman say was, "Stupid Council, stupid town." Since this post was published, Friedman has informed Gossips that what he actually said was, "Stupid Council, stupid town government." Consequently the post has been edited to include the word government.  
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