At the Madison Retriever Club’s fall field trial in 1971, the winner of the Open All-Age stake was a crackerjack black Lab named Candlewood’s Little Lou. It’s said that only one person leaves a field trial happy, but if there was ever such a thing as a popular victory that was it. Little Lou, you see, was a local favorite, owned and handled by a beloved club member named—drum roll, please—Mary Howley. These days the doyenne of Candlewood Kennels is a living legend, but in 1971 she was just a scrappy gal with loads of chutzpah going toe-to-toe with the heavyweights of the retriever game.
As if beating most of the top dogs and handlers in the country wasn’t gratification enough, Little Lou’s win also qualified him for the upcoming National Retriever Championship. Howley should have been on top of the world, but in fact, the moment was bittersweet. The National was at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California that year, and as dearly as Howley wanted to go, and to give Little Lou his chance, it simply wasn’t in the cards. She was a dog groomer from Madison, Wisconsin, for crying out loud, not an heiress, a captain of industry or a Wall Street tycoon. Through the lens of her bank account, the National Championship might as well have been happening on the moon.
That’s when the cavalry arrived. One of the professional trainers competing in Madison that weekend was Billy Wunderlich. Although not an old man—he was in his early 50s then—Wunderlich, of Winona, Minnesota, was a revered figure. A veteran of the field trial wars whose roots in the sport ran as deep as anyone’s, his glittering resumé included the 1951 and ’58 National Championships along with hundreds of other notable wins.
The thing about Billy Wunderlich, though, was that he was as good with people as he was with dogs—maybe even better. He dressed sharp, never forgot a name and could charm the copper off a penny.
In any event, when Wunderlich heard that Howley was short the dough to travel to California, he mobilized. “You’re going to that field trial,” he assured her. He buttonholed a cross-section of the wealthy owners in attendance—those assorted heiresses, captains of industry and Wall Street tycoons—opened the charm valve, and in about the time it takes to say “ante up” raised a cool $1,000 in cash, no I.O.U’s accepted, to bankroll Howley’s trip.
One husband-and-wife, filthy rich but notorious tightwads, turned Wunderlich down. “He held it against them for the rest of their lives,” Howley recalls, laughing at the memory.
She adds, “I went to California, ran Little Lou in the National, and made it to the fourth series—pretty good for a couple of rummies from Wisconsin. But I had a great time, and I owed it all to Billy Wunderlich.”
Born in 1919, William P. “Billy” Wunderlich grew up in Winona, a Mississippi River town in southeast Minnesota with a rich duck hunting tradition. It so happened that one of the country’s earliest promoters of the golden retriever, Ralph Boalt, also called Winona home, and sometime in the mid-1930s Boalt gifted young Billy a pup—an event that pretty much set the course of Wunderlich’s entire life.
With a leg up from Boalt (a kind of Johnny Appleseed of the golden retriever breed) and the cohort of golden enthusiasts he’d cultivated, Wunderlich turned pro within a year or two of graduating from high school. He called his operation Flat-Broke Kennels, advertising it as “Home of Future Champions” and himself as a “Golden Specialist.”
Much of his early success came with dogs bearing the prefix of Boalt’s Stilrovin Kennels—a legendary name in golden retriever circles. One of the first notable winners he helped to develop was Stilrovin Nitro Express, a rugged customer who won the Country Life Trophy for Derby of the Year in 1940 and eventually became the first Dual Champion golden in the history of the breed.
Along with most of his contemporaries in that first generation of American-born retriever trainers, Wunderlich served in the Army K-9 Corps during World War II. Posted to Fort Robinson, Nebraska, the largest of the Army’s five “war dog training centers,” he trained dogs for guard, scout, messenger and sled dog duty. He also trained soldiers how to handle those dogs.
One of his fellow pros at Fort Robinson was T.W. “Cotton” Pershall, who would go on to fame as the handler of the immortal King Buck and the private trainer for arms and ammunition mogul, John Olin. While Wunderlich and Pershall had been acquainted before the war, their time together at Fort Robinson—one of those places frequently described as “not the end of the earth, but you can see it from there”—cemented an abiding friendship.
Following the war, Wunderlich hit the ground running. In 1947 an electrifying young Minnesota-owned golden named Ready Always of Marianhill, a.k.a. “Lucky,” caught his eye; a year later he was able to arrange the dog’s purchase by two of the most prominent retriever fanciers in the country, Mr. and Mrs. Mahlon Wallace, Jr., of St. Louis. The terms of sale included the stipulation that Wunderlich had exclusive rights to handle Lucky in Open competition—a characteristically shrewd move on his part.
Lucky’s predicted greatness came to pass when, after narrowly missing out in 1949 and ’50, he won the 1951 National Retriever Championship in spectacular fashion, turning back a stout bid by King Buck. Little did Wunderlich or anyone else dream, at the time, that Lucky would be the last of his breed to accomplish that feat; every NRC winner since has been a Labrador.
Wunderlich himself handled a Lab, Nilo Possibility, to the National title in 1958. Not long after that, he entered into a private arrangement with Mrs. Grace Lambert, a society matron from Princeton, New Jersey, to train and handle her string of classically handsome black Labs. The Lambert-Wunderlich partnership produced ten Field Champions, two of whom, Duxback Scooter and Ace High Scamp of Windsweep, would eventually be enshrined in the Retriever Field Trial Hall of Fame.
Mrs. Lambert enjoyed attending field trials with Wunderlich and being squired around by him. He liked to tell the story of driving her to one of the invitation-only cocktail parties that were de rigueur among the well-heeled East Coast retriever crowd. Pulling up in his truck to the Long Island mansion of an heir to the Grumman aircraft fortune, Wunderlich was met by a uniformed butler.
“Deliveries in back,” the butler curtly informed him.
Without saying a word, Wunderlich got out of the truck, opened one of the dog boxes, and pulled out a small footstool. Still without saying a word, he placed it on the passenger side of the truck, opened the door, and helped Mrs. Lambert—who was attired in formal evening wear—step down.
When Wunderlich returned to pick Mrs. Lambert up, the butler wordlessly preceded her to the truck, pulled the stepstool from the dog box and set it in front of the passenger-side door.
In 1984 Wunderlich married Ruth “Pert” Vasselais, a vivacious force-of-nature whose life story could have been the plot of a pre-code Barbara Stanwyck movie and whose late husband, Roger Vasselais, was an avid amateur field trialer. Pert often drove the dogs ahead to field trials while Roger, who was a big Wall Street muckety-muck (and whose name was pronounced Roe-ZHAY), flew to meet them after the markets had closed.
The Wunderlichs soon moved to a hobby ranch near St. Ignatius in western Montana, where in retirement Billy raised prize-winning Angus cattle and kept a few Labs and springer spaniels for hunting. Then, in the 1990s, they threw themselves body-and-soul behind the effort to create the National Retriever Museum/Retriever Field Trial Hall of Fame at the National Sporting Dog Center in Grand Junction, Tennessee. They knew everyone who was anyone in the retriever world, of course, and they used their considerable powers of persuasion to solicit donations not only of money, but of art, field trial trophies, photographs, memorabilia—everything.
In recognition of his tremendous accomplishments and contributions to the sport, Billy Wunderlich was elected to the Retriever Field Trial Hall of Fame in 1994. Only three professional trainers—Charley Morgan, Rex Carr and his old friend Cotton Pershall—got there ahead of him. Fittingly, his early benefactor, Ralph Boalt, was also named to the Hall in 1994. It took Pert a little longer, but she was enshrined in 2003, three years before her death.
Billy Wunderlich died in 2008 at the age of 88. He’d had a hell of a run, and whatever regrets or disappointments he may have had don’t seem to have weighed on him: In every photograph you see of the man, he’s wearing a cat-who-ate-the-canary smile.
This article originally appeared in the 2020 Guns & Hunting issue of Sporting Classics magazine.