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WANTED
SMART BUSINESS COMPANIES
Issue No. 4
January 2011
p
M O NTHLY
Springwood District Dog Training Club Inc. The committee wish all our club members and Their pooch’s a happy and safe new year!
The Early Days of SDDTC - August 1993 By Lesley Piggott and Pamella Waters
Where were you in 1993?
Would you like to advertise your company in our beautiful new colour magazine? We have: • ¼ of a page at $5.00 • ½ of a page at $10.00 • full page (½ an A4) for $20.00 We will also put a copy of your business card on our back page for $15.00 each month (please note as we have an agreement with our sponsors, so printing companies, pet shops & Vet’s cannot be included in this offer)
New Web Site The Club now has a brand new Web Site. It is still at www.sddtc.org. This has been a long time coming but it has been worth the wait! Ally who did it has done a great job as It is much easier to use and faster too with more photo’s. I am delighted with it and would welcome members views about it? We have some photo’s from our recent Agility Trial and some not so good ones I took at our Halloween night on my phone mmm…. More photos will go up after our dinner and presentation night on December 2. If you have any photo’s of your dog send them to me. Plus if you forget to pick up your new colour club magazine it will also be on the web site each month I hope you enjoy it.
Ella Sweeney (Newsletter Co-Ordinator)
Disclaimer please note: News, views and opinions in this newsletter are those of the correspondent’s and not necessarily those of the club, editor, committee and publicity officer. The Springwood District Dog Training club INC reserves the right of rejection of material.
What do you remember? Paul Keating was the Prime Minister. John Fahey was the NSW State Premier. Late in the year in summer (actually January 1994), Springwood and Winmalee were just two of the towns that were savaged by bush fires. But that is a story for later on! Sydney won the right to host the 2000 Summer Olympic Games. On TV, ‘A Country Practice’ has its final season, and a NEW program called ‘Blue Heelers’ debuts (it is not expected to succeed!). The Brisbane Broncos won the Footy Grand Final.
A Club is born!
ourselves into a ‘workable’ group. Our first trainers were Gwen, Ann, Dot and Malcolm. Without those volunteers – community and dog spirited, we would never have got our endeavour off the ground. Our biggest problem in those early days was WHERE to train – and at night! We needed lights, and fences so the dogs didn’t run off when we lost control! Not, an easy task. We tried using the local school at Winmalee - too dark! We tried using the oval at Summerhayes Park, but the Soccer club forbade it. So we ended up using a bitumen basketball court – we paced the white lines and learned how to do figure of eights and sit, stay, drops all on the bitumen – and in VERY cramped conditions. We had 12 dogs all on the white lines together! But we DID have lights!
BUT, at a more local level, Springwood was without its own Dog Training Club, and as you can see from the photo above – there were ‘unruly’ dogs and exasperated owners everywhere! Finances So, Pamella, Deborah Greenhill and I decided to find someone local to Tea and Coffee – oh yes, we had help us train our dogs. We just thought a GAS primus stove, and charged that if we got a few interested people Pam, Lessley & the dogs 20c a cup The Primus was donated together – we would be able to learn to the Club by a nice man. Pam how to train our dogs – heavens made cakes and biscuits and we sold those too knows we had 3 boisterous dogs between us! at the break. We needed the funds! We dreamed about having electricity and maybe even building After a LOT of letter box drops, notices in the shops a clubhouse just like the clubhouse at Summerhayes at Winmalee, and word of mouth, we managed to – one day! have our first meeting in the back room of Deborah’s house in Hawkesbury Road. We were VERY lucky to Membership have Dot, Ann and Gwen (three ladies we did not know), and Malcolm all turn up to see what was We had so many people who wanted to train their going on. dogs just to live with them happily. Our numbers kept growing and we had to put trainers through so that Well after a very shaky start, we managed to find we could have more than one or two classes. As our someone who knew more about dogs than us (not hard mind you) and agree on how to organise Continued Page 3