What Kind Of Name Is Hoover?

I had heard the name as given to a dog a some point in my life and thought it sounded like the perfect name for a dog. If you have ever watched a dog in the kitchen or around the dinner table, most dogs are watching the floor with great concentration for anything that falls. Since Hoover is the brand name of a vacuum cleaner, and just mentioned floor cleaning skills of dogs, what better name for a happy dog? So this would be the short version of why I named my dog Hoover, but you know that's not the whole story. Any dog cool enough to get a web site named after him has to have a better "How did he get his name" story than that, right?

Way back in the years before we meet Hoover, I had mentioned to my wife once that when we lived in a place where it was reasonable to have a dog, that I wanted to get a really great dog and that I wanted to call him Hoover, for the above mentioned reasons. She agreed that it would be nice to have a dog when we had a yard and thought the name was cute. A few years later we moved into a nice townhouse in Alabama where I had accepted a job with a local television station. One of the things I did at the station was to set up a program with the local animal shelter to feature a couple of animals each week in commercials to encourage people to adopt pets from the shelter. Every week a nice lady from the shelter would come by with dogs and cats to be used in the commercials. One week as we were watching the production team try to get the puppies to sit still long enough to take a picture, this nice lady told me that they had just received a litter of Lab/Rott mixed pups. That combination struck me as a wonderful mix and that it would make a good looking dog with many nice qualities. So I called the wife and asked her to meet me at the animal shelter to take a look at the puppies. 

When we arrived we were led to a pen that was full with no less than twenty puppies of various breeds. The only way to examine the ones we came to look at was to get in the pen with them. So I knelt on the floor surrounded by puppies all playing and running about while I tried to get a good look at the new batch. From the moment I touched the floor this one little dog was all over me, climbing up on my legs to get at my face, jumping, bouncing, barking and using every cute puppy move in the book to get me to notice him. He was not one of the Lab/Rott mix that I had come to see so I tried to ignore him, but this little guy with the short legs was not giving up. I could not get a good look at any of the other pups with this puppy climbing in my lap and doing everything he could to get as close as possible. He was a Labrador/Basset mix and he had decided he was going home with me. Unable to resist his charms, the wife and I decided he was right. We went back to the front desk to fill out the adoption forms and take home our new friend. While filling out the forms the nice lady from the shelter asked what we were going to name him. Now that long past conversation with the wife on this subject had all but been forgotten by me, but without a second of hesitation, my wife answered "Hoover, we are going to name him Hoover". 

So there you go, now you know about the day Hoover adopted me, how he got his name and you probably have a good idea of why I married my wife.