The 1-Eyed Dog

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One-eye-dog

By Daivd Blaisdell Smith

The City of Richmond, Calif. was established in 1906 — with a Post Office. Fire, police stations and a city hall soon followed. The city became known as Point Richmond and was adjacent to the Southern Pacific Railroad and the Chevron Oil Refinery. By 1917, many Richmond businesses had outgrown the Point and moved east to MacDonald Avenue.

In 1940, Henry Kaiser established four shipyards on Richmond’s waterfront, located on the north shore of San Francisco Bay. By 1942, Kaiser’s shipyards were in full swing 24 hours a day, and everyone who wanted to work could, and had money to spend. The criminal element naturally followed the money, and they kept the 40-man police department busy with a population that grew from 25,000 to 100,000 almost overnight.

In 1942, my father, Officer Beryl Blaisdell Smith, badge #33, was assigned the walking beat on MacDonald Avenue. This area became known as “Downtown Richmond.” His police job was to patrol up and down MacDonald Avenue, between 1st Street and the Southern Pacific Railroad tracks at 16th Street. He also had to cover the side streets from Bissell Avenue to the south, and Nevan Avenue to the north, which ran parallel to MacDonald Ave. This brought him in contact with citizens and business owners, and his job expanded to include checking movie theaters, bars and pool halls.

On The Lookout

He had been given a tip from an informer who said, “Look out for the man with the 1-eyed dog.” Always on the lookout for the criminals in town, my father was unable to find a man with a 1-eyed dog. He found bulldogs, hound-dogs, junkyard-dogs, lapdogs, sheepdogs and wiener-dogs, but no 1-eyed dog. Every time he had a hotdog for lunch he would remember the 1-eyed dog tip.

Some time had passed since he had received the tip when he stepped into a pool hall on lower MacDonald Avenue. Conversation stopped, money disappeared and the clash of billiard balls stopped as he walked around eyeballing the pool sharks. As he glanced at the stand of upright pool cues he spotted a shorter stick out of place. On closer examination he found it to be a Malacca Cane, its handle topped with a carved ivory head of a dog — with one eye missing.

He noticed a brass juncture between the dog’s head handle and the cane body. On pulling them apart, he found a 29″ tapered triangular blade that ran down to a sharp point. The top part of the blade was decorated with gold motifs on a blue background. Looking at all the occupants in the pool hall he asked, “Whom does this belong to?” Not surprisingly, no one said a word.

Dad confiscated the Toledo sword cane and added it to his growing collection of contraband weapons. As it turned out, dad had found the 1-eyed dog, but not its master.

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