We traveled back to Michigan and I did all these sketches of the dog and took some photographs of the dog, and brought that back. That dog became Fritz, the dog in The Garden of Abdul Gasazi. The dog’s name that my brother-in-law gave to it was Winston. So, anyway, Winston was a fine pet, and I loved visiting him – a very unusual dog.
Winston was still okay after the first book. So I’m not sure exactly why I chose to commemorate him in the second book, but he does appear as a small pull toy. But Winston lost a territory fight with a car not long after Jumanji – and Winston didn’t make it. He died.
I think that was right about the time I started the third book. And I thought, as a way of honoring Winston and the contribution he’d made to my first book as the character of Fritz, that I would include him from then on. And so Winston, or Fritz, has been in every book since in very tiny, little cameo appearances. Sometimes, he appears in places that the kids feel that I haven’t played fair with them by hiding him there. In Two Bad Ants, he’s actually in the garbage disposal, disguised as a slightly putrid piece of garbage. But the kids find him there, and then they write me letters, “How did Fritz get in the garbage disposal, and why is he so tiny?”
It’s pretty trivial for me. I don’t start a book thinking, “This is another opportunity to hide Fritz.” It’s just a little throwaway thing. But sometimes I’ll be in bookstores signing books, and I’ll see kids come to the bookstores with their parents. This will be the first time they get a book. They’ll grab it from their parent’s hand and rifle through it – and they’re looking for Fritz! That’s the first thing they want to do. “Where’s Fritz?” So, it’s another little amusement for them, but not terribly important in the scheme of things.
