Tippy, His Owner’s Best Medicine, Is Back Home

Rest easy, Lori Chevallier. Your beloved Tippy, that shaggy-haired cockapoo that has shared your bed since he was a pup and has nursed you through the roughest of times, has been found after 4 days and nights.

He’s a bit thinner now, minus a few teeth, and those brown curly locks have been trimmed. But he’s still his old lovable self, prone to giving wet, sloppy kisses and nuzzling a stranger’s chin.

No one dreamed that Tippy’s disappearance would cause such a stir, but then this is no ordinary dog. And neither is his owner.

Suffering From 2 Diseases

At 22, Lori Chevallier is suffering from leukemia, a form of cancer affecting the blood. She also has Down’s syndrome, a congenital disease characterized by retardation.

If life was not always kind to Lori Chevallier, Tippy was there to cheer her. Ed Chevallier will tell you that that one shaggy dog has done more for his daughter than all the hospitals, medicines and therapy that the experts can muster.

“She loves that little guy,” he said. “He sleeps with her. They’re inseparable. That dog is better than any medicine for my daughter.”

So when Tippy wandered off Tuesday afternoon from the Buena Park home where he had been staying for the day, Chevallier put out a countywide distress call seeking help in finding the 10-year-old cockapoo. Lori was in a San Jose hospital undergoing treatment for leukemia, and Chevallier did not have the heart to tell her that Tippy was missing.

The search for Tippy soon became the stuff of legend. First the newspapers publicized the Chevallier family’s plight, then radio and finally, television. Calls started pouring in, slowly at first and finally so many that Chevallier and his 16-year-old son had to take turns answering the phone.

“We had over 140 calls from all over Southern California,” Chevallier said. “People wanted to help. They wanted to buy Lori a new dog for Christmas, or help form a search party. We had one call from Alhambra from someone saying they thought they spotted Tippy up there. That’s 65 miles away! The response was just overwhelming.”

Unknown to the Chevalliers, Tippy showed up Tuesday night about 2 miles from where he had disappeared, in the La Palma yard of Kenneth and Deborah Holmer.

“My daughter was the one who actually found him,” Deborah Holmer recalled Saturday. “We thought he was a stray. He had a collar on but no license. He was scared and nervous, but the next day he was acting like he was ours. He’s a very sweet dog, you know.”

On Wednesday morning, about the time Chevallier was calling the newspapers looking for publicity, the Holmers took Tippy to the International Grooming School in Anaheim for a checkup and a trim.

“He was a bit shaggy and we wanted to clean him up,” Deborah Holmer said.

As it turned out, Tippy needed minor surgery to remove a cyst from his neck, a few teeth had to be pulled and a veterinarian cleaned up a problem with his left eye.

It was there, while being shaved by groomer Sharon Clanin, that Tippy’s true identity was learned.

“I was fixing him up and I said, ‘I know that dog!’ ” Clanin said. “It was just the look. It was like a flash. I had seen his picture in the paper.”

The Holmers were called, then the Chevalliers, and a reunion was set for Saturday morning at the grooming school for final and positive identification.

When the Holmers drove up with Tippy sitting on Deborah Holmer’s lap, Chevallier and his son, Raymond, ran from the lobby laughing and pointing and shouting “That’s him! That’s Tippy!”

“I thought I had a new dog,” Deborah Holmer said later, explaining that her last dog, Daisy, had also been a stray but had died last year. “But something told me that maybe he belonged to someone else. You could tell he was well cared for. I kept thinking that with my luck he will belong to a child with leukemia, someone who really needs this dog back. Something told me not to get too attached.

“And you know, he got along great with my cats (Fred and Ebony), and that’s not easy to do. He’s just so docile and sweet. But I’m glad he’s back home where he belongs.”

Chevallier said Saturday that Lori was due home in 2 or 3 days and that only then would he break the news that Tippy had been lost.

“I didn’t want to tell her when she was in the hospital,” he explained. “It would’ve broken her heart. She asks about him every day. When she comes home, we’ll sit down and I’ll show her the tapes of the TV news and the newspaper stories about Tippy and tell her what happened.”

“She’ll probably break into a big smile, give him (Tippy) the high five sign and then call him a ham.”