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Roger: What was your first "hot" dog?

Sunny: My first good Afghan that I was excited about and I did a lot of winning with, was Champion Taj Akbaruu of Grandeur. He was a home-bred puppy. He was the most unique, odd color. He had a chocolate mahogany saddle, with like honey colored cream sides, with a blackish muzzle and black ear tips. When he was born, he had black boots, but he lost the black boots and they became cream. He was a very exciting dog. He had great style. His head was always held high, his tail was always held high. He was the most intelligent of dogs; he would listen, come whenever I called him. He used to walk the city streets with me, never having a leash on him. Never ran away. He was a very intelligent Afghan.

Ch. Taj Akbaruu of Grandeur ("Scootchy"), c. 1946

He was my breeding out of Doreborn’s Karya, which was one of my earlier Afghan females, from the original pair that I had, and a dog called Nehru of Ku, which was an imported dog with English background. Anyway, this dog was a great masculine, very, very stellar like quality dog. And he was in the era of when Rudiki was being shown and his son, Ch. Ali Khyber too. And when he would get the breed, he would do very good in the groups because he was such a spectacular dog. He wasn’t as large a dog, as those that were winning in those days, but he was the correct size of the Afghan. He was 26 inches at the shoulder and he was a very sound dog, and he moved excellently, magnificently. But I did have the tough competition of the dogs, with a lot of heavier coats, and of course they were more glamorous than Champion Taj Akbaruu.

We used to give him a call name, called "Scootchy", because I had a little girl at the time (Gareen) and we used to call her Scootchy, and I didn’t think that was a very becoming nickname for a little girl, so we changed it from her to the dog. So he was known to all his friends as Scootchy, and that was Ch. Taj Akbaruu. Then he mated to a bitch I had called Ch.Khanhasset Ginger of Grandeur, who was a daughter of Ch. Ali Khyber and Far Away Loo. Far Away Loo was one of my foundation bitches and was a great bitch.

So, I bred Ch. Khanhasset Ginger to Ch. Taj Akbaruu and Blue Boy was whelped. When Blue Boy was brought into the world, he was a very unique silver-blue color, which astounded me because I had never seen that in an Afghan before, and I was thrilled because it was a magnificent color. And as he was growing, he became a beautiful dog because he took his father’s great style and showmanship and brains as well. He was one of my favorite dogs. He was my house pet as well as "Scootchy" was also. This dog, Blue Boy of Grandeur, was a heavier coated dog and a very glamorous dog and he did a lot of winning at the time of the Afghans and he was very unique. Everybody was very enamored with his coloring. He was a pale, pale blue-white on the sides with a chinchilla-blue back, with a dark mask and black ear tips. So, this was Champion Blue Boy. Blue Boy was the father of Shirkhan of Grandeur.

So, you see there was a dynasty of great male dogs and a line. Champion Taj Akbaruu begot champion Blue Boy of Grandeur and Blue Boy of Grandeur was the sire of Champion Shirkhan of Grandeur, among other dogs that he had sired, which were also very good, famous dogs at the time. Champion Blue Boy did that. He was a very fascinating dog and very well loved by the people going into dog shows because he too, used to run around without a leash and he would come whenever I called him. He would always be walking at my side in a heel position, without every really training the dog. I never actually formally trained either champion Taj Akbaruu for obedience or Blue Boy for obedience.

However, Blanche Saunders, who was a very famous dog trainer at the time, used champion Taj Akbaruu as a demonstration dog for two of her classes that she was holding in New York City for people to learn obedience and she used him as her demonstration dog. He never was formally trained but he was so intelligent, that if you would tell him once what to do, he would just do it automatically all the time. And Blue Boy, his son, was very much the same way. They would also have a thing that if any one of my dogs would ever get loose and ran, they would run after them and throw them down to the ground and hover over them until somebody came and captured the dogs, like a herder. They were very thrilling dogs in those days. I don’t know if any of the Afghans are going to do that today or not. Most people don’t even allow to leave their dogs off leashes.

But these were my great dogs at that time, but as I said before, we did have the big name dogs of Ali Khyber and Rudiki and they were very glamorous and they did a great deal of the winning at the shows. Then I was looking through this English dog magazine and I saw this beautiful dog sitting on the rock and I just had to have this strain, and I got my friend Sol Malkin to become friends with this Julie de Bairacli Levy from England and she decided she would sell me one of her beautiful dogs. That’s when I got Turkuman Nissim’s Laurel and, of course, he was a very lovely, well coated, beautiful moving dog, and he took the hound group at Westminster in 1950.

One evening I had come home and I had brought one of my sister’s poodles from New York and I had left him in the crate. The next morning, my kennel girl Dorothy Chanade opened up the crate where the little poodle was, and this poodle was very high strung and started to go for her and leaped out of the crate and started to run. Blue Boy was running around the property at that time, chased this poodle back towards Teconic State Parkway, and just as they reached the main road where the cars were zipping down about 70 miles an hour, he threw the poodle into the air and the car that was going to hit the poodle, hit Blue Boy and killed him. Dorothy brought him back with tears streaming down her eyes. I guess they had broken his neck and that is how Blue Boy died. He got hit by a car, as a great many Afghans do.

Sunny with Shirkhan at a local match judged by Robert Tongren (Ben-Ghazi). c. 1954

He did leave a great son, which was Champion Shirkhan of Grandeur. He was only a puppy at the time, I guess about eight or nine months, I decided then that he was going to take Blue Boy’s place in my heart, because he was his son and was a great dog. I felt he was a great dog then and he later turned out to be one of the greatest dogs in the country. Shirkhan had a very good coat. He had beautiful ears and he was a great, stylish mover, beautiful body, beautiful curl in his tail, very low hock. He was an extremely beautiful Afghan. He was much more glamorous than his father, and he threw very beautiful puppies. Another very famous son that he had was a dog called Champion Khabiri of Grandeur, which was the foundation of the Khabira Kennels.

Roger: Who did he compete against?

Sunny: Boy Blue was competing against champion Ali Khyber and Rudiki at the time. He would beat them sometimes but a lot of the times they would beat him because they were being shown by handlers and they were very glamorous and they were the big names in those days.

Roger: How tall was Blue Boy?

Sunny: 27 inches. He was also not the biggest dog. He was a very short backed dog. I was really young at the time. It was much the same as it is today, people who spend a lot of money in showing and advertising usually do a lot better at dog shows than people who don’t advertise as well, which is what it was. They advertised in all the big magazines, so they were the more well known owners.

Sunny obviously discussing dogs. c. 1958

There was a lot more friendliness at the dog shows. We used to have only bench shows at the time, the unbenched shows are relatively a new thing. But we used to have these bench shows where you would have to sit until late in the evening, they wouldn’t let you leave the place until at least 9:00 or 10:00 at night or when the show was pretty much over because they wanted the people at the gate pay the money to see the dogs that are on the benches.

So, we used to sit on the benches and talk with each other and talk with the other breeders and gained a great deal of knowledge from these talks on the bench. That’s why I feel that not having the bench shows anymore, a lot of people lose out on a great deal of knowledge which they could be learning by talking to these various people. Now they come to these unbenched shows, they show ten minutes before they go into the ring and then they leave as soon as they get through, so they don’t have much opportunity to discuss dogs and talk about dogs, as we used to do. People used to go bring various lunches and we used to share each other’s lunches and there was a great deal more of comradery and friendship than of course there is now. Most of the times after shows, different groups of people would go to different people’s houses and we would have parties. They don’t do that as much anymore, that’s what we did many years back.

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