By Irene Castle, founder of Orphans of the Storm animal shelter

If I am remembered a hundred years from now, I hope it will not be as a dancer or as a style leader, for customs change from generation to generation, and the exponents of fashion eventually become footnotes in a book on a shelf. No, I think if my life has any lasting value, it is in the career I entered in 1928, when Helen Swift and I opened "Orphans of the Storm."

Our idea was a simple one. We were going to found a refuge for stray dogs, the mongrels that nobody wanted. We would bathe them, cure them, and make them available for adoption--making very sure they went only to good homes where they would be appreciated. We soon found that it was not going to be as simple as it sounded.

First, there was the matter of a location. We scouted around and found a piece of property in Deerfield (Riverwoods), Illinois, which had an old kennel on it, and after a lot of hard work we managed to get it into usable shape. Each dog would have plenty of good food, warm bedding, and a large exercise yard to stretch his legs in. We had no running water, no electricity and no gas. We put a large coal stove in the center of the main building and managed to scrape enough money together to hire an old man to serve as caretaker and keep the fires burning.

The day we stood and looked at our completed handiwork was a proud one. "What shall we call it?" Helen said. I remembered an old play the Gish sisters had starred in. The name of the play was perfect for our purposes. "Let's call it 'Orphans of the Storm,'" I said.

We knew we would have no trouble filling our refuge. From the first day, we were deluged with calls, not only from people who had read about our work in the papers, but from police stations around Chicago that were picking up strays by the dozen. We had no truck, so I was appointed official collector. People must have been startled to see a dozen mongrels riding in the backseat of my very lovely town car.

We started from the ground up. We both carried pails and shovels, cleaned yards, took temperatures, washed hundreds of dogs, and since we could not afford a full time veterinarian, learned to diagnose and treat a hundred different diseases. I answered mail, made speeches, and fell into bed at the end of everyday, thoroughly exhausted.

We had decided we would operate the first year on three thousand dollars and between us, we put that much into it. But from the first week we found that our little budget was far too small. One day I was pumping water form the well to wash the feed dishes, when, with a galumph, the well went dry. We consulted a well digger, who shook his head while holding a pipe, as though he was taking its pulse. It was thoroughly exhausted. We need a much deeper well. And deep wells took money and lots of it.

We went to see Mrs. Robert R. McCormick, who loved animals dearly and was our president for thirteen years, until she died. She agreed to go fifty-fifty on our improvements. But 50 percent of a fortune is still a fortune, and I stripped myself raw to sink a new well.

Another problem came up. Timid animals kept getting away from us and bounding after the owners who had left them. The cars would disappear and the dogs would be loose in the countryside. It took Helen and me hours to track them down.

One evening after a five hour chase, Helen and I crawled back to the refuge, clutching a frisky stray who thought this was the greatest of fun. We locked him in and collapsed.

"What we need is a fence," Helen said, when she finally got wind enough to talk.

"Fences cost money," I said. "Lots of money."

"Do you want to spend the rest of your life catching the same dogs over and over again?" She asked."

I thought it over. I mortgaged my soul. We fenced in five of our ten acres.

It soon became more complicated than ever. We had a sort of lease plan at "Orphans of the Storm." No person who took a dog into his home, from the refuge, owned it outright. They could keep it as long as they gave it the kind of home we approved of, but the minute they broke any of our stringent rules, we took it back.

This led to the investigation of cruelty reports, and, finally, I became a policewoman. This was the only way I could find out what was going on. If you go to somebody's front door and say, "I'm here to investigate a report that you chain your dog in the basement," they invariably say, "Just a minute." By the time you are finally admitted you find the dog occupying an unaccustomed place of honor in the middle of the davenport.

I got smart early on and approached the house from the rear so I could see what was going on.

As I look back, I wonder how I ever had the patience or stamina to fight cruelty to animals in the first place. It has never been a popular cause and I made a lot of enemies defending animals--people who wrote anonymous threatening letters to me, politicians who had been using dog pounds as convenient places to put political henchmen who had been promised jobs, jokesters who found it easy to exercise their wit by making light of what I was doing.

In all fairness, a lot of the opposition came from wellmeaning people who had nothing against me personally. They argued against what I was doing, not on any moral grounds but because there were so many other worth-while things that needed doing.

"Why don't you campaign against cruelty to children?" They insisted. "Why don't you organize a charity to feed the poor starving people of Chicago or work with a missionary society for overseas relief?"

I always told them the same thing. The poor of the world have a thousand eloquent voices to speak for them besides tongues of their own. Orphans and mistreated children are popular causes, with powerful organizations to protect their welfare and wealthy donors to rush to their defense. The relief of people oppressed by famine, flood, or disaster is the objective of scores of organizations with well trained workers and millions of dollars at their disposal all over the world.

But the voice speaking out in defense of the starved cow or the mongrel abandoned to scavenge for existence has always been a very small voice indeed. I don't know why, but humane work seems to lend itself to more ridicule than all of the other sincere causes. Newspaper make fun of the person who speaks out against cruelty to animals - with silly captions and ludicrous photographs. It takes a world of dignity and deep rooted compassion to survive the kidding. But the person who succeeds emerges with his self-respect vastly fortified.

The above is taken from Irene Castle Enzinger's autobiography, Castles in the Air, published by Doubleday, Garden City, N.Y., copyright 1958.