A former educator gets a life-changing assignment.

Barbara Umlauf was well into her second decade as a kindergarten teacher at the Holy Family School in Frackville, Pennsylvania, when she got the telephone call that rocked her world. Not that she had any idea that would be the case when she answered the phone.

“Could you perhaps help place a few homeless animals?” The voice on the line—which belonged to a local government official—was reassuring. Just 15 dogs and a couple dozen cats were at stake. It was 1984, and the Pottsville, Pennsylvania, SPCA was about to be shut down, as the elderly couple who’d owned and run it for the past three decades had both recently died. Since their assets amounted to little more than a few decaying cages on the side of a hill, closure seemed the only practical option.

Moreover, said the caller, when it came to placing the motley assortment of animals left behind, the industrious kindergarten teacher—who was already known as a local animal rights activist—seemed a practical choice for getting the job done.

“When I was asked, ‘Can you come close the shelter and help place the dogs?’ I had no idea of the problems in society regarding homeless animals,” Umlauf explains. “I hadn’t been exposed to it. I’d lived a nice life and just thought, Sure, I’ll get these few dogs and cats a home, and then I’ll get back to my routine. But for every animal we placed, five came in…”

A quarter-century later the aptly renamed Hillside SPCA is a thriving no-kill shelter, home at any given time to approximately 100 dogs and 250 cats. Dogs at Hillside are not caged; they romp in large running areas, swim in special pools, and take supervised mountain hikes with shelter volunteers.

Four new buildings have state-of-the-art subfloor ambient heating—easy on the paws during cold Pennsylvania winters. And though budgets are strained to the breaking point, no needy animal is ever turned away—and no unwanted pet is ever euthanized. “At shelters that euthanize animals, older dogs are often put down immediately as a matter of policy,” Umlauf says. “I don’t agree with that. Our 12- and even 14-year-old dogs get adopted.”

A facility like Hillside, however, doesn’t happen overnight. “As the shelter began to consume my life, I had to cut back to half days of teaching,” Umlauf notes, adding that this was not her original plan. “I simply couldn’t get help; nobody wanted to work at the shelter. The pay just wasn’t enough.”

Worse still, when she assumed temporary control of the failing facility, its bank account contained precisely $105. “Within my first two months here, the Department of Agriculture inspector told us we had to install a septic system,” she says. “The quote was $7,000. They might as well have said $70,000. It was just as unattainable.”

MONEY CHANGES ALL

Though she feared that this initial economic crisis might well finish her, Umlauf conducted a quest for press coverage that generated enough charitable contributions that she was able to install the system—a small victory that gave her the courage to continue her good works.

“Within two years I had given up my teaching career to run the shelter full-time,” she says. “It wasn’t my choice to leave teaching. It was a matter of need.” The four-legged kind, that is. Today Umlauf oversees 18 employees who work the shelter’s various shifts, as well as three “cruelty officers” who investigate reports of animals in distress.

“In the last month we rescued 30 dogs that had been simply left behind to die in houses after their owners moved out.” The biggest trend she’s seen over the last decade, Umlauf says, is people surrendering pets simply because they’ve “lost interest in them.”

Citing the story of Sadie, a lovable German shepherd/husky mix who was surrendered because the two teenage boys she lived with had decided they liked basketball better than their dog, Umlauf confesses she couldn’t hold back. “I suggested to the boys’ mother, who was dropping Sadie off, that with the kind of example she was setting, she’d better hope her boys didn’t lose interest in her down the road.

“This kind of thing seems very much a product of our throwaway society,” Umlauf adds. “We also see a lot of problems with unwanted dogs being generated by puppy mills, especially when a particular breed becomes popular. When the remake of 101 Dalmatians came out, we were overwhelmed with unwanted Dalmatians.”

HUMAN KINDNESS

Public outreach remains a huge part of the shelter’s mission. Hillside offers a robust spaying and neutering program and an animal CPR course (see story, right), and conducts unique fundraisers, including canine beauty pageants.

“When the Internet came about, some volunteers approached me about building a website for our shelter,” Umlauf says. “My first thought was, Who would look at the Internet and adopt a dog? Boy, was I wrong! Today 70 percent of our adoptions are web-based.” To date, Hillside dogs have been placed with adoptive families from Maine to Georgia (hillsidespca.com).

“We have been very blessed with public support and compassion,” notes Umlauf. “Gypsy, a German shepherd who lived at Hillside for two years without finding a family, developed a tumor while she was here. She had to have a leg removed, and just two days after returning from the hospital she found a permanent home!

“I loved working with kids,” says Umlauf of her teaching days. “And there are no snow days anymore. No summers off. I have worked every Christmas for the past 25 years. Managing a shelter is not my career of choice; all my friends are retiring right now, with pensions.

“But looking at all those small faces with nowhere to go—I just couldn’t walk away.”