The first day Duke disappeared from John and Kathy Massarelli’s rural Machias home, they weren’t too worried.
Sometimes their friendly dog would make neighborhood visits, or smell a deer and wander away. He’d always come back.
“You kind of accept this stuff in rural areas,” John Massarelli said. “It isn’t living in Bellevue and having a house pet poochie.”
After a day, Massarelli drove up and down the road, worried Duke had succumbed to a pet pitfall – a speeding car, a hunter, a wild animal.
“A couple of days later, I was making a cup of coffee and I looked at The Herald, and there he was, bigger than life,” Massarelli said.
Duke, the abandoned dog the Massarellis adopted five years ago, had actually disappeared from an Arlington family’s yard six years before, John Massarelli learned. At that time, Duke was a puppy named Griffey.
In the few days since he’d disappeared from the Massarelli yard, the dog formerly known as Duke had unwittingly made national headlines.
It all started just after the dog wandered off, when Everett Animal Control officers picked him up trotting down Newberg Road in Machias.
When Everett Animal Shelter workers waved a microchip-reading wand over the pit bull mix, his ID number popped up.
When Terry Sawyer’s phone rang Sept. 20, it would jump-start the most surreal week of her life.
Griffey, the dog she, her husband Chris and their daughter Alex had long given up for dead, was waiting to be picked up at the shelter.
Six years after Griffey had disappeared, news of the unusual reunification with the Sawyer family traveled far.
Then there was the second out-of-the ordinary phone call: NBC’s “Today Show” called – the network wanted a live, national interview with the Sawyers. They agreed, and a camera crew arrived at 3:30 a.m. Thursday.
They filled the living room with equipment; the Sawyer’s furniture went on the front deck. They were going live at 5:30 a.m.
Host Matt Lauer asked each a question.
“It was two hours of set up, one minute of filming, 20 minutes of tear down and they were gone,” Terry Sawyer said.
Until unusual phone call No. 3 of the week, the Sawyer family could only guess where Griffey had been.
Back in Machias, John and Kathy Massarelli knew the Sawyers might be wondering, so they called to fill in those missing years. And to offer the Sawyers the 40-pound bag of dog food they’d just opened for Duke.
The Massarellis told the Sawyers about Duke’s favorite living room sleeping spot and how he preferred the porch in warm months.
And how Duke’s best friend Tuck – a neighbor’s Airedale – and Tuck’s owner would take the pair of dogs out for hamburgers.
The dog was beloved by neighbors, meter readers and garbage men. The Massarelli’s mail carrier would sometimes wait by the driveway to give the dog a biscuit.
Though they took Duke in and loved him, the Massarelli family is moving in the spring and had started to look for his new home.
“It was a nice five years,” John Massarelli said.
The Massarelli and Sawyer families decided they’re going to get together soon with Griffey. They’re even going to invite Griffey’s friend Tuck.
The Sawyers already have a full house – Tawni the dachshund, Lucky the Labrador and Olivia the cat. Despite Griffey’s providence, Terry Sawyer wasn’t sure the family could keep another big dog.
At some point between the Massarelli’s mystery-unraveling phone call and going live on the “Today Show,” something clicked.
“It’s so obvious that this is our dog – it’s so obvious,” Sawyer said. “It wasn’t even said out loud, we just knew he was going to be part of the family.”
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