Prize

In Washington, D.C., the Tail-Waggers' Club, a local society of animal lovers, has a TV giveaway show. Generally, the prizes have been animals. Last week the first prize was to be a pony. After scouting around, Tail-Waggers' President Marilyn Himes found a pony named Trigger down in Virginia. She trucked him to Washington and brought the beast right into station WMAL-TV's Commonwealth Building studios for dress rehearsal. Trigger turned out to be a very large, very old pony. In fact, he was almost as big as a horse. Moreover, he didn't like elevators.

It took both luring and pushing to get him in and up to the second floor. Once there, he trotted out, upset a sand-filled spittoon, and startled office tenants who gawked out their doors to see what was happening. Shoved into the tiny studio (known locally as "the glorified phone booth"), the pony stamped and snorted amid an underbrush of dogs, cats, chinchillas and nursery-school moppets from Baltimore. While the outraged building superintendent threatened to evict everybody concerned, and Businessman Noah Brinson on the floor below threatened to break his lease, the unstrung, unhousebroken pony committed the first of several nuisances.

The crowd grew as janitors arrived with mops and the Tail-Waggers decided upon a strategic retreat. But Trigger, again faced with the elevator, would have none of it. In desperation, a group of radio technicians picked up his hind legs. With a veterinarian banging him on the nose, the pony was walked backward on his front feet into the elevator.

Out front there were more crowds and a policeman said that somebody would have to get that darned horse offa the sidewalk. Shunted into a back alley, the dazed pony was photographed by a newsreelman. That night, the pictures were used on the air, while Trigger still cowered in the alley, shaken by his unnerving day.

At week's end, with the prize pony carted off to Baltimore by the contest winners (the excited nursery children), Tail-Waggers' Marilyn Himes solemnly promised that the club would never again give away anything bigger than cats, guinea pigs or, possibly, dogs.

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