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went on to win seventeen Bests in Show and fifty-two Toy Groups, and walked off with the Pekingese Club of America specialty trophy. In 1976, he captured the Toy Group at Westminster, the pinnacle of dog shows.
    Top show dogs are extremely healthy and well socialized. They cannot win a show if they have temperament problems, if they are underfed or underexercised, are poorly groomed, or walk in a way that suggests poor structure. His raft of awards demonstrated that at that point in his career, Wolf knew how to take proper care of his dogs.
    Once his partnership with Jeffords ended, Wolf moved slightly closer to Philadelphia. He purchased three acres a few miles northeast of nearby Lower Oxford, a community on the fringes of the Brandywine Valley, where he continued to breed dogs. Wolf couldn’t have picked a more bucolic spot to establish Mike-Mar Kennel. Chester County was centrally located—forty-five miles southwest of Philadelphia—and drenched in history. Just over the border in Delaware was the site where the paper used to print the Declaration of Independence and the country’s first dollar bills was milled. A short drive away was the legendary Longwood Gardens, the landscaping extravaganza that attracted more than a million visitors a year.
    Not only was the area historically prominent, it was prosperous—Chester County has the highest median income level in Pennsylvania—and influential. Less than a mile from Wolf’s property was Lincoln University, the nation’s first college for African Americans. Among its graduates were Thurgood Marshall, the first black justice to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, poet Langston Hughes, and acclaimed actor Roscoe Lee Browne.
    Yet in the picturesque hills that stretched for miles, agriculture still ruled. It wasn’t unusual—in fact, it was quite common—to see black-clothed Amish farmers clop-clopping down the two-lane roads in their horse-drawn buggies on their way to and from their immaculate farms.
    Along with its other amenities, southeastern Pennsylvania offered Wolf a less tangible but equally important amenity: privacy. In the 1700s, the gently sloping landscape had attracted Quakers, German peasants, Welsh farmers, and the Pennsylvania Dutch—people who prided themselves on their ability to tolerate diversity. Likewise, the biggest ethnic group to settle around Lower Oxford, the Scotch-Irish, had come to America to escape religious persecution. Their descendants had no interest in delving into the business of others.
    In dog show circles, though, stories began to circulate about the questionable conditions at Mike-Mar Kennel. Wolf himself acknowledged he had a problem. In a 1983 interview published in Kennel Review magazine, he said he was reluctant to let his dogs go. “My kennel is past 100 dogs now, because I’m not very sensible,” he told the magazine (which has since folded). “I have a lot of old friends in the kennel. They’ve given me a lot of joy as show dogs and breeding, so I keep them.”
    He went on to say, “A lot of people discipline themselves and place their bitches at five years old, and I think that’s a great idea, but it’s very hard for me to do.”
    By the late 1980s, Wolf’s dogs were still winning trophies but Wolf himself had lost his own personal panache. One breeder who got to know him around that time said that, unlike other handlers who donned tailor-made suits for their moment in the spotlight, Wolf “always looked like he just got out of bed. His big belly was hanging over his pants.” Not that it mattered. “At that time,” the breeder said, “given his reputation . . . he could have taken in a hamster and he’d win.”
    Wolf entertained dog show judges with elaborate dinners at his home, but he began to step back from the rigors of the show circuit. By the 1990s, he was spending more time breeding dogs than showing them. He took on a new partner, Gordon Trottier, a reclusive man whose mother, Wendy, raised