Answering the Call
Tri-City Tales Issue No. 22
For Greg Porter, animal services was an accidental job. When he first arrived in town, in 1987, he was a 20-year-old college student eager for a summer internship. A junior at SMU who wanted to learn about city governments, he had just about given up finding a job when someone suggested he make a cold call to Cedar Hill.
He had never been to Cedar Hill. Never held a job other than working the rides at Six Flags. The woman who answered the phone invited him to meet with the assistant city manager, who gave him a tour. He saw the rolling hills, and old downtown around city hall. “I fell in love with the place,” Porter says. He never left.
He was first hired as an intern doing odd jobs – “asphalting streets in the summer is quite an experience,” he says – and eventually as an administrative assistant. In 1990, he was made Community Services Manager, which at that time included animal control. So when he wasn’t working on plans and budgets for parks, he was taking calls.
There was no shelter back then. That meant Porter would jump in his car, drive to the dog’s location and try to gently coax the animal into his back seat. He brought a lot of strays to his back yard for temporary housing. The dog pound, he says, was a dismal place, and there was no means set up for adoption.
He admits he wasn’t exactly qualified. Once when he was using a hoe to get a snake out of woman’s garage, he took a swing and knocked a hole in her sheetrock. Another time, the city got a call about a “giant bird” near Bear Creek. He and a colleague drove out to find a free-range emu. Not knowing what else to do, they began to chase it. (“Boy, are they fast.”)
One day after he was newly married, he took his bride Pam to visit the pound. She was sick with strep throat. “I said, ‘I need you to come with me for 10 minutes.’ I walked in there and showed her this dog. It was a Chihuahua. ‘I said, ‘This is this dog’s last day. If we don’t take it, it’s out of days.’ ” It wasn’t exactly true. But she said yes, and it became their first shelter adoptee.
A few years later, the little dog was killed in a car accident that also took the life of their young child. As they grieved from the unthinkable tragedy, someone from the city faxed him a photo of a dog with a ribbon around his neck and a note reading, “I’m for you.” They named him Shorty. “He became part of the restoration of our soul and our family.”
Porter learned that animal service jobs require super-human depths of compassion and resilience, and people who work them should be “sainted and taken care of.” He once was called to rescue a St Bernard that had fallen into a creek. She could not climb the steep embankment. Her fur was matted and wet. He hoisted her onto his shoulders and carried her up the muddy slope. She was an old girl, and her hips were spent. The vet recommended euthanizing her. He still remembers the heartbreak, but says that he was comforted knowing she did not die alone and scared in the creek bed.
As Porter ends his storied career as city manager on July 19, he says spearheading construction of the animal shelter is the thing that makes him most proud. The cooperation between the cities of Duncanville and Desoto became a statewide model, and set the stage for future tri-city partnerships for emergency response and training.
“You can map the growth and maturity of this special city with the growth in how it has tended for its animals,” he says. “With animals, there’s a certain connection to the soul. We are taking care of them the way they should be.” He might have thought he wasn’t qualified for animal services, but in truth, he always was.