I got to see these family photos for the first time today. This is a dog that featured heavily in my dad’s dog stories that he used to tell us when we were kids.
This is Cam, the first AKC dog that my family ever owned. She was a rough collie “like Lassie,” as they say. My dad is standing to her right. The date is April 1962.
And like Lassie, she had to have a litter. This one included some tricolors. My uncle Doug is sitting behind the mother collie in May of ’63– twenty years before I was born.
I had not seen these photos before, though I had seen some rather poor photos of Cam.
The bottom photo really reveals what she was: She was a collie from a time when they were still very close to the intelligent farm dogs from Scotland from which their kind descend.
She looks gorgeous but more rugged than the collies of one might see today. She was still very much the “Scotch shepherd” of the American farm and dog fancier magazines.
Natural History 
very cool, you can tell the snout isn’t as bad as with the more show dogs
I had a collie APBT mix that was a really good dog. His father was a large AKC scotch collie who lived on a dairy farm. I dont think he was a serious herding dog. This dog of mine made me think of Jack London’s character Buck. He was a super dog. It seems like the pit bull evened out all the collie short comings and complemented the strengths. He was handsome, biddable, and hunted like a terrier. He ended up knocking out all his incisors hunting varmints. He stalked game just like a cat, and could climb trees. He lived to the ripe old age of 17. He was almost as fast as a greyhound, when he was young and single handedly treed a black bear. He made think that the legends about these collies were partly true.
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