Bob Weatherwax, who trained dogs who played Lassie as a member of the famous family that also taught Hollywood hounds a thing or two in The Thin Man (Asta), The Wizard of Oz (Toto) and Old Yeller (Spike), has died. He was 83.
Weatherwax died Thursday at a Veterans Administration facility in Olyphant, Pennsylvania, his son, Robert Weatherwax, a former animal trainer for films and television shows, told The Hollywood Reporter.
Bob Weatherwax was the son of Rudd Weatherwax, the original owner and trainer of Pal, the collie introduced to moviegoers in the MGM classic Lassie Come Home (1943), starring Elizabeth Taylor and Roddy McDowall.
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His grandfather, W.S. Weatherwax, was an actor and animal trainer in the silent era, and his cousin, Ken Weatherwax, played Pugsley Addams on The Addams Family.
Bob Weatherwax served as an animal trainer under his dad on the CBS/syndicated Lassie series that aired from 1954-74 and on the 1978 film The Magic of Lassie. After the father died in 1985, he worked on a 1994 Lassie movie and on two other series that featured the iconic pooch.
Weatherwax’s uncles, Jack and Frank, trained Toto for The Wizard of Oz (1939) and Spike for Old Yeller (1957), respectively. His dad also handled Asta (real name: Skippy) for the entertaining series of Thin Man films and Daisy, the dog in the Blondie movies.
Born in Burbank on June 4, 1941 — exactly one year to the day after Pal was born — Weatherwax spent his life in the entertainment dog-training business. He assisted with dogs in his father’s kennels almost from the day he learned to walk.
As a child, he often was called on to assist in training, even if only to stand still while Lassie or another working dog learned a routine. He and his sister, JoAnne, were the only ones who could truthfully say that their pet was the real Lassie. At home, the dog often was assigned the job of being his babysitter.
After a stint in the U.S. Army, Weatherwax returned to California to follow in his father’s footsteps and eventually establish Weatherwax Trained Dogs as his brand.
“Due to my father’s genius, we transformed the training of dogs from simple props on a movie set into actors who seemed to behave with human-like emotions,” he wrote.
Weatherwax also served as the handler for the dog Einstein in Back to the Future (1985) and worked on such other movies as Big Jake (1971), Nickelodeon (1976), The Thing (1982), The Osterman Weekend (1983) and Dennis the Menace (1987).
Weatherwax carried on the Lassie legacy until 2002, when his family, against his wishes, he said, voted to sell the Lassie trademark. (MGM owned the rights to Lassie, but when the series of films ended, Rudd Weatherwax obtained them.)
He wrote a tribute to his father, Four Feet to Fame, published in 2017. His last collie was a grandson of the last Weatherwax-trained Lassie.
