Members of the Schenectady Dog Training Club pose with their best friends during a club outing in the fall of 1955. Dogs learned obedience and performed exercises with their masters.
‘Cry ‘Havoc!’ And let slip the dogs of war” was one of Shakespeare’s best lines.
Jacqueline Delaforgue might have preferred one of her own: “Cry ‘Heel!’ And let skip the dogs of Schenectady.”
Delaforgue may not have been an expert on Shakespeare and his famous play “Julius Caesar,” but she was an expert on teaching dogs. As a member of the Schenectady Dog Training Club during the 1950s, Delaforgue worked with collies, sheep dogs and other canines.
“The dogs learn such things as how to retrieve on the level and then over the high jump; to broad jump on command; to ‘stay’ without standing up or turning around while the master goes out of sight,” wrote Schenectady Gazette reporter Ralph M. Turner in 1955.