Take one electrical engineering student. Add one former pharmacist-turned-novelist. And what do you get?
Some happy dogs.
Ben Moquist is a third-year student at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks.
His father is Richard "Rick" Moquist, a retired pharmacist.
They and the rest of their family (mom/wife Barb and sister/daughter Amanda) like animals. Dogs in particular; they have two in their north Fargo home.
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The Moquists are appreciative of the efforts of the Humane Society of Fargo-Moorhead. Amanda, in fact, sometimes volunteers to walk the dogs there.
But the Moquists noticed that the dogs in the Society's nine kennels were sleeping on hard floors.
Maybe the dogs didn't complain, but it bothered Ben.
So one afternoon last summer, Ben built nine platforms for the dogs.
He made them out of particle board, mounted them on 2-by-4s, covered them with indoor-outdoor carpeting and put metal strips around the edges so the dogs wouldn't gnaw on the board.
His dad helped him. Well, at least, Rick says, "I carried things around for him."
Then they gave the platforms to the Society.
Their pay? The satisfaction of knowing the dogs are sleeping off the cold floor.
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Thanks to their kindness, a dog's life isn't so bad after all.
Rick and Wendell
Rick, one of the heroes of this story, also is the man responsible for the heroics of Wendell Franklin.
Wendell is the nephew of Benjamin Franklin, and he solves crimes.
But only in fantasy. Wendell exists only in Rick's stories.
Rick, a native of South St. Paul, attended Minnesota State University Moorhead, then earned his pharmacy degree from North Dakota State University.
He was practicing pharmacy when his eyes went bad due to macular degeneration.
Forced to give up pharmacy, Rick looked for something he could do.
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He found it as the result of attending a creative writing class at MSUM in 1990.
He liked to write. And he was a big fan of mysteries. So he began writing mystery short stories featuring the fictional Wendell Franklin. He wrote nine of them under the umbrella title of "The Franklin Mysteries"; and lo, one of them was published in Armchair Detective magazine.
That was followed by the sale of one of his stories to Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.
Then he went big-time. He wrote a novel.
"Eye of the Agency" was published by St. Martin's Press in 1997. This, too, was a historical detective mystery, but it's hero wasn't Wendell Franklin; it was a heroine, the fictional Sadie Greenstreet.
That book is out of print now. But Rick still is writing, working in longhand on a legal pad, with Barb transcribing it onto a computer.
Maybe one day he'll come up with a story about a canine detective. He and Ben have the platform on which to build it.
If you have an item of interest for this column, mail it to Neighbors, The Forum, Box 2020, Fargo, ND 58107; fax it to (701) 241-5487; or e-mail rlind@forumcomm.com
