This is an I-Heart podcast.

This is Lee Habib, and this is our American stories, and we tell stories about everything here on the show,

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What we do, it isn't free to make our American stories,

but we want to make sure it's always free to listen to. And up next, Jeremy Swick, historian and

curator at the College Football Hall of Fame, tells us this story of Sergeant Stubby,

the street dog turned soldier, turned college mascot.

Here's Jeremy.

Sergeant Stubby, of the First World War, the heroic story of America's most decorated war dog.

So who was Sergeant Stubby?

Nobody knows exactly when the dog, later known as Sergeant Stubby, was born, but it is thought to have been during the first half of the First World War.

He was a dog of uncertain breed, described in early news stories as either a bull terrier or

Boston Terrier, with a short stature, barrel shape, and friendly temperament.

Until 1917, it has thought he wandered the streets in New Haven, Connecticut,

scrounging for scraps of food. But he was no ordinary stray. Just a few years later, following the end of the First World War, the tenacious canine would become known as one of the most decorated dogs in American history. Stubby's fortunes changed in July of 1917 when he began hanging around a group of soldiers,

members of the 102nd Infantry Regiment, as they trained on the grounds of Yale University.

One of the men, a 25-year-old private named Robert Conroy, took a shining

to the young dog and began to take care of him, naming him Stubby for his stature and tail.

Although the U.S. military didn't yet have an official military-working dog program,

...