Puppy Love Conquers All: ‘Rosebud’ a ‘Hobo’

Rosebud, a young mixed golden retriever found wandering in South Pasadena on New Year’s Day, presumably will be reunited with an owner or owners this morning--but it won’t have been easy.

It is to be hoped he appreciates all the trouble everybody has gone to.

As it turns out, his name is really Hobo, which he probably likes better than Rosebud, of all things.

It also turns out that more than one owner may show up to claim him.

When found, he was wearing only a red bandanna and “Dog Tag 175, Parksville, 1982” around his neck.

Los Angeles County animal care people dubbed the friendly dog Rosebud because he had been found near the Rose Parade route. They lodged him in their Downey center and began checking with six different Parksvilles around the United States. No dog of his description appeared to be missing from any of them.

It wasn’t until Thursday, after helpful calls from thousands of dog fans from as far away as the Virgin Islands, where the Rosebud story was printed, that a check was made with Parksville on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada.

At Parksville’s City Hall, where the phones were “just going crazy” in the words of harried employee Jennifer MacDonald, records showed that the number on the tag was that of a golden retriever named Hobo and registered to Danielle Cohen.

But no one was able to find her.

Then, late Thursday, Claudette Cohen of Orange, the mother of 11-year-old Danielle, got a call from her own mother in Vancouver.

“Hobo is on TV tonight,” Mrs. Cohen was told. “You’d better get hold of the pound.”

At more or less the same time, Joy Yensen, of Alhambra, got a call from a friend who told her, “Hey, your dog’s on TV.”

It was the Cohens who brought Hobo here from Canada when they moved to Orange County a couple of months ago.

“He actually belonged to Danielle,” Mrs. Cohen explained.

She said the family could not keep Hobo in Orange because they are living in an apartment. Through a friend at his place of work, a Monrovia automobile agency, her husband, Jay Cohen, gave the dog to Yensen.

Mrs. Cohen said her husband and Danielle plan to go to the animal shelter this morning and that “my daughter would like to get the dog back, but we can’t keep him here, so it’s really a rather touchy situation.”

The Cohens had the dog for four years in Canada and she described him as “a very loyal animal. He’s fantastic.”

Yensen also plans to be at the animal shelter this morning with her son, Gabriel, 4, and her daughter, Anna, 7.

“I had only had the dog about four weeks,” she said Thursday night. “He got away from me at 5:30 a.m. the day before New Year’s, just two blocks from my home. He just took off.”

It wasn’t as though he had any reason to leave, she seemed to think. It wasn’t as though she was calling him Rosebud or anything. She had tried calling him Sam, but he didn’t care much for that, so “we just kept calling him Hobo. It was easier on the animal.”

She said she and her children “definitely missed the dog.” She called Hobo “a wonderfully dispositioned dog” and said she was “really sorry to lose him.”

Yensen said she had gone to “every pound I could think of, but I didn’t think of Downey. I just didn’t think he’d go that far.”

After Cohen’s call, she telephoned the shelter and was told she would have to prove she was the owner. She said she plans to show up with two photographs of the dog taken at Christmas.