PUPS FIND LOVE ON OTHER SIDE OF TRACKS.

Byline: DENNIS McCARTHY 

BURBANK- Their mother had taught the pups well, Kathy Simons could tell. They didn't make a peep at night and they didn't roam.

They would just lie there quietly in the darkness of her side yard, all seven of them, sleeping snuggled up against each other until the sun came up.

You only had to take one look around their old neighborhood to understand why, she said. It was pretty tough.

When you're 6- to 8-week-old puppies born on the wrong side of the tracks in an old Santa Fe train yard in Chinatown - where men like her husband, Ernie Simons, store their heavy-duty equipment working on the Blue Line - you're prey to anything and everything that moves out there on the streets at night.

So, be real quiet and go to sleep, puppies. Don't make a sound. Let your mother stay up and worry about your safety and feeding, about keeping you alive as long as she can.

Ernie got off his drilling rig and followed the two homeless men to a corner of the old train yard where they told him the puppies lived with their mother. They swore she looked just like a fox.

Nobody could get close enough to be sure, though. The men had been dropping off some food once in a while to gain her trust, but she was still keeping all strangers at bay.

They were right though, Ernie thought, watching the dark red dog with the pointed ears nurse her puppies from a distance. She did look exactly like a fox. But her puppies looked like a United Nations of breeds, all colors and mixes.

When he got home to Burbank that night about a month ago, Ernie told his wife, Kathy, about the puppies and how cute and different they were.

``Take a video, I want to see,'' Kathy said. So, he did.

``When I saw it, I couldn't believe how beautiful and unique every puppy was,'' she said. ``I showed it to my niece who works as a veterinary assistant.

``She said to get them out of there now, before they turned wild like their mother, and likely died trying to survive on those streets.''

So, that's what Ernie and Kathy did a couple of Saturday's ago while the puppies' mother was away during the day. They put the seven pups in two big dog crates and brought them home.

Pretty soon, every kid in their Burbank neighborhood heard about the wild, homeless pups from Chinatown living over at the Simons house, and dropped by to play with them.

``My kids fell in love with them, and we wound up taking one of the puppies,'' said Gina Voehringer, a neighbor down the street.

``Last week we took a family trip on the Metro Rail downtown to visit Chinatown, and I showed the kids where Ernie was working on the Blue Line,'' she said.

``I told my kids this is where the puppies would have been living if he hadn't rescued them - on these streets, begging for food.''

Two other pups went to Larry Castro at the Rite Aid store in Burbank. He's the guy who developed the pictures Kathy took of the puppies. He had recently lost a dog to cancer.

``When I found out what the situation was, I wanted two so they could play with each other,'' he said Monday. ``I named one Hobo because of the train, and the girl I named Lady.''

Alan Lowrie, Kathy's ex-husband and a retired Burbank fireman, took another one of the puppies. His 12-year-old son named it Buddy.

``I don't have a doubt in my mind that those puppies would be dead right now if Kathy and Ernie hadn't rescued them from that train yard, and found good homes for them,'' Lowrie said.

Two other puppies were adopted in less than an hour last week as Kathy and Ernie sat outside the Burbank Animal Shelter hoping to find two couples who wanted to give a good home to a couple of cute puppies who started life on the wrong side of the tracks.

``We were going into the shelter to save one (a dog), and she was out there waiting for us - the one,'' said Ruberta Vasquez of Van Nuys, who is moving later this month to a three-acre family ranch in Wrightwood with her husband and their new dog, Coco - born in a Chinatown train yard.

The last puppy the Simonses kept for themselves. Brownie, the runt of the litter.

It takes a lot to make Ernie Simons cry, but he says he came as close as he has in a long time last week.

When the guys in his engineering crew heard what he had done for those wild puppies living in the old train yard, they gave him a big hand and pat on the back - telling him what a great thing it was to save those wild puppies and give them a home.

But one of the guys told him he had missed one, that there were actually eight dogs back in the train yard, not seven.

Go see for yourself, the guy said. It's still back there hiding deep in the shadows under some heavy equipment.

From a distance, the guy swore, it looked just like a fox.

Ernie crawled back there, past the rat poison, and found her dead.

But the seven puppies she gave birth to a couple of months ago on the wrong side of the tracks got out alive.

CAPTION(S):

photo

Photo: Ernie Simons pals around with Brownie, the runt of the litter he rescued from a Santa Fe train yard in Chinatown.

John Kennedy/Special to the Daily News