Dog Man of Portland (lawyer, live, zoning)

[Officefan64]

Does anyone remember the Dog Man of Portland? His name was David Koplow...and he was around in the 80's until they took his dogs away? A friend and I were just talking about him and I was looking for more info.

[dmonty]

I remember him but I don't know anything about him.

[moughie]

I sure remember him.

I worked in the Old Port in the 1980's. Sometime in the very early morning I would see him walking around Commercial Street. If I recall, you could often hear him talking to his dogs.

Whatever happened to him? I bet Al Diamon would know.

[Officefan64]

I seem to remember he left town when he was told he couldn't keep his dogs anymore???

[7th generation]

MLM Law - Lawyer Grimes & Reese PLLC - Attorney Specializing in Multilevel Marketing - Maine v. Koplow 476 A.2d 1155 (1984)

[TheDailyCompulsion]

For some reason stuff like this fascinates me. I am not old enough to remember the Dogman but I found this with a quick google search:

'Dogman' Raising Portland's Hackles - The New York Times

Sounds like he was fighting with the city quite a bit. That article is about how he fought to have the waterfront zoned so no residential property would be built there, but he lived in a metal shack on the water so didn't want the zoning to apply to him. I emailed an older friend of mine who said this about the Dogman:

"I remember that DOG-man! He was FAMOUS! There were ARTICLES about him, court cases, he was a MAJOR cause célèbre (in Portland standards of course) and everybody in town knew him! And how could you NOT?! Here was this disheveled geezer who looked like he hadn’t shaved, or bathed, in three wks, always wearing the same grimy blue pants and blue shirt, leading a band of AT LEAST half a dozen dogs…probably more. And the whole time he was BARKING at them: “MISSY! GET OVER HERE!!” yeah, it was a strange scene: HE was doing the barking, not the dogs!! Never sure where the dude lived…rumor had it he slept under the wharf. He sure LOOKED like a vagabond, but I wanna stress, the guy was NO hippie! He wasn’t some fruit-pie new-wave type..he was a hardened, grizzled water-front character who happened to find comfort in the presence of…dogs. Come to think of it, that guy was one of a kind…"

Man what a trip. I wonder where he is now.

[Officefan64]

Man what a trip. I wonder where he is now.[/quote]


That's what I was wondering...where is he now??? I do remember there being t-shirts "Save the DogMan".....wish I had bought one!!

[moughie]

An update on DogMan from Al Diamon :

"Koplow appears to have left Portland for good sometime in the early 1990s. I haven't heard anything definitive on his location, although a Press Herald story from 1991 quotes then-Police Chief Michael Chitwood as saying he thought Koplow was in Boston."

Btw, check out Al Diamon's blog at Downeast.com. Al has been around for a good long time and has a firm understanding and grip on politics and life in Portland and Maine.

[old port tavern]

Originally Posted by Officefan64

Does anyone remember the Dog Man of Portland? His name was David Koplow...and he was around in the 80's until they took his dogs away? A friend and I were just talking about him and I was looking for more info.

I remember him I grew up in Portland and Munjoy Hill area and the Old Port area....Naomi