Myrle Hale fell for chihuahuas in 1958, and has bred and raised them ever since. Her devotion is also evident in her newsletter, Los Chihuahuas.
By JAY CRIDLIN
Published February 27, 2004
DOVER - For the moment, Myrle Hale's home is quiet.
This, of course, could change the second an ambulance passes her house on Thonotosassa Road. If something startles even one of the dozens of chihuahuas in her backyard kennel, her windows might rattle from a supersonic wave of high-pitched yipping.
"They can get loud," she says of her tiny dogs. "If a siren were to go by, they'd all howl."
Not that Hale minds the noise. For more than four decades, Hale and her husband, Charles, have bred and raised prize-winning chihuahuas, as many as 100 at a time, behind their Dover home.
Hale's dogs have even developed a global following through Los Chihuahuas, a bi-monthly newsletter devoted to the breed that she founded in 1976 and now ships to more than 800 loyal subscribers.
For Hale, a retired dental hygienist who got her first Chihuahua in 1958, it's a labor of love for the petite pooches that have become her surrogate children.
"I like smaller animals," she says. "I need something that would like to sit on my lap and be held."
A former board member of the American Kennel Club's Canine Health Foundation, Hale has always had nothing but the dogs' best interests at heart. She developed a countywide reputation for housing strays and unwanted older dogs; a Tampa veterinarian once dubbed her "the East Side Humane Society."
"What are you going to do with them?" she asks with a shrug. "So we just keep them."
Hale graduated from Plant High School in Tampa and the University of Tennessee's dental hygiene program in Memphis before taking a job with Davis Islands dentist Kenneth Wadsworth in 1953.
For nearly five decades, she cleaned thousands of south Tampa teeth working for Wasburg and his successor, Kendall Baker - who as a child was actually a patient of Hale's.
"I went to her as long as I had teeth, from the time I was three," said Baker, who now practices in south Tampa. "I'm not sure who really worked for who."
Hale took pictures of her show champions to the office and sought homes for stray dogs by describing them to patients.
By the mid-1970s, her love for chihuahuas was so apparent that a friend convinced her to start up one of the first magazines devoted solely to the breed.
The quarterly magazine, now nearly 100 pages thick, carries dozens of advertisements and photos of national breeders' show champions, who have names like El Toro's Mary Quite Contrary and Desmond's Bandana Ruff-Stuff. But there are also cartoons, tips and articles; an issue last fall included a piece on birthing chihuahuas by caesarian section.
"It pays its own way, and that's all I wanted it to do," Hale says.
Hale ships Los Chihuahuas all over the world, from South Africa to Japan. The latter is a hotbed of chihuahua activity; in fact, Hale has written several guest columns for a Japanese chihuahua breeders' magazine.
Now Hale is preparing for a national chihuahua show this spring in Orlando - an event she expects to be huge. "The Taco Bell thing made them very popular," she says. "A lot of people want them because they think it's going to be easy money."
She scoffs. "It occupies hours of my day."
But as long as the chihuahuas are well behaved, that's fine by her. Her second career as a breeder allows her and Charles time to travel, provided someone watches the dogs, and she says that keeps her feeling young.
"The dogs are a very important part of my life," she says. "If you don't have something that makes you get up in the morning, that makes you get up and do something, you're dead. You cannot sit in the rocking chair. You've got to get up and go."
AGE: "I won't tell you how old I am. One of my pet peeves is to pick up something that says, "So-and-so, 70 years old...' It doesn't have any bearing on the story."
HOME: Dover.
SPOUSE: Charles, a retired horticulturist.
HOUSE CATS: Frankie and Patches.
HOUSE DOGS: Cygnet, Mayday, Last Hurrah, Envy, Sarah, Twinkle, Sparkle, Gladiator, Striper.
ENVY?: "Everybody wanted him."
FAVORITE BREED: Surprisingly, not the chihuahua, but the fox terrier. "I think they're very stylish and spunky."
FOOTBALL FEUDING: Myrle attended the University of Tennessee, Charles the University of Florida. "He gets all upset if the Gators lose" to the Volunteers in football, Myrle says.
HOBBIES: Traveling, collecting chihuahua figurines and American Indian art.
AVERAGE COST OF ONE OF HER DOGS: $300-$500.
COST OF A YEAR'S SUBSCRIPTION TO LOS CHIHUAHUAS: $20.
