![]() He endured the military life with an orphan's stoicism, and his later account of his fighting days was, Orlean tells us, "soldierly and understated". ![]() The first world war had been grinding on for three years when Duncan enlisted in the army at the age of 17, hoping to become a flyer, although he only got to fly once, and was wounded on his first sortie. There he had a pet dog named Jack which he dearly loved, but soon his restless mother was on the move again, and Jack had to be left behind. And indeed, in 1901, Elizabeth reclaimed Lee and took him to live on her parents' farm. The institution, Orlean writes, "operated as a peculiar sort of pawn shop", since if their fortunes improved parents who had deposited their children there could redeem them, unless they had been adopted in the meantime. When he was five, Lee's father abandoned his young wife and family and disappeared, and shortly thereafter the boy was put into the Fred Finch Children's Home in the East Bay Hills in California. Lee Duncan, the owner and, it might be said, the inventor of Rin Tin Tin, was born in 1893. ![]()
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