Retrievers: The Legendary Charley Morgan

Books on the technical aspects of retriever training abound. Retriever books that you can enjoy whether you’re training a dog or not are much rarer. These are books whose literary merits set them apart, and in my opinion there are only two that indisputably qualify. One is The Working Retrievers, first published in 1983 by eminent artist and sportsman Tom Quinn. The other, published in 1968, is Charles Morgan on Retrievers.

Based on hours of tape-recorded conversations and voluminous correspondence, On Retrievers was brilliantly compiled and edited by Ann Fowler and D.L. Walters. Informed by Morgan’s unimpeachable authority and leavened by his sense of humor, it’s part memoir, part training manual, part philosophical meditation, and overall wonderful reading.

“Charley” Morgan’s famously rumpled exterior—threadbare tan vest with bells and whistles spilling from the pockets, knee-high leather boots with laces untied—belied a perceptive intelligence that rarely drifted far from the needs of his beloved retrievers and the question of how to bring out the best in each of them.

Morgan described his approach this way: “I think that as a dog man, I am not especially gifted, nor do I have any revolutionary ideas. I go along with the old ideas that have been proven, adding some ideas that I might have picked up along the way. . . . I probably tolerate more unruliness, and punish dogs less, than many other trainers.”

By any measure, this approach served Morgan well. He won the National Retriever Championship on three occasions, won the Country Life Trophy six times, and “made” 17 Field Champions. When the Retriever Field Trial Hall of Fame announced its inaugural class in 1992, Morgan was among the honorees.

For all his distinctions in the field trial arena, Morgan insisted that the work he most enjoyed was training hunting dogs. The gundog trainer, he wrote, “gets no glory, no crowd to clap and cheer, no friends to buy the beer.” But, he added, “Doing this kind of work has given me more satisfaction than winning three nationals.”

Born in Lamar, Missouri, in 1894, Morgan was the elder statesman of the first generation of American-born professional trainers, a group that included T.W. “Cotton” Pershall, Roy Gonia, and Billy Wunderlich, among others. He acquired his first retriever, a female Chesapeake Bay retriever, while working at a lumberyard in Tyndall, South Dakota, sometime in the 1920s. After turning her into a crackerjack hunting dog, he shipped her to Long Island to be bred to a stud dog owned by prominent Chessie fancier Tony Bliss. Bliss liked her so much that he bought her and then began sending dogs to Morgan to train.

Morgan moved to Wisconsin in 1939 to train privately and then served as an instructor in the US Army K-9 Corps in California for a year. In 1942 he established Morgan Kennels in Random Lake, about 40 miles north of Milwaukee. One of the many professional trainers influenced by Morgan, J.J. Sweezy of Maryland, left this verbal snapshot: “His kennel was an old fox farm with a hundred runs. He wore white painter coveralls, and there were always paw prints on his chest from the dogs leaping on him. After dinner he’d wipe bacon grease from his big Sunbeam skillet with a piece of bread and go out to the kennel. He’d turn on the floodlights and walk around talking to the dogs. If there was one he’d been hard on that day, he’d give him a piece of that greasy bread and softly sweet-talk him.”

Charley Morgan died with his boots on, succumbing to a heart attack while competing in a field trial in southern Wisconsin. He was 74. Those who were there recall that he simply crumpled to the ground on a snow-covered rise, a spot that for many years after was known as “Charley Morgan’s hill.” A lifelong bachelor, he left no descendants. But, thanks to the wisdom that pours from the pages of Charles Morgan on Retrievers, all of us who love our dogs have been enriched by his legacy.