Media: John Grogan Likes It Ruff

It’s a style that has prompted some colleagues to refer to him as “Captain Obvious.”

And yet …

“One of the things I hear most often from readers is, ‘You articulated exactly what I was thinking,’” says Grogan. It’s tough to get hard numbers on who reads a column, and the question of who exactly reads his, when put to Grogan bluntly, understandably provokes a glare. But unofficial polling suggests his musings are pretty popular. Barnes and Noble in Willow Grove, for instance, attributes the large crowds that showed up at Marley events to column readers.

The series of columns Grogan did about Marley, his ill-behaved but adorable Lab, which he started back at the Sun-Sentinel, were especially well-received, a fact Grogan seems baffled by even now. “I try to write about important topics like children in distress,” he says, “but then I’d write about Marley and I’d get five times the mail. People seem to respond more to topics that deeply affect their lives.”

He is a tiny bit uncomfortable with this. Grogan would like to be more of newshound, more Thomas Friedmanesque. Once, in Florida, he went to a high school and quizzed students on current events, and subsequently wrote a column about the deplorable state of education. But when the final Marley column, “Saying farewell to a faithful pal,” ran in the Inquirer last January, he was overwhelmed with mail: “I think I came in to about 800
e-mails. My voicemail was full. I thought, ‘Hey, I really may be onto something here.’”

Captain Obvious wasn’t really onto something new. Two years earlier, Publishers Weekly, citing books like Amazing Gracie, about a deaf, anorexic Great Dane, said, “Memoirs of living with a beloved canine companion … [seem] to be a definite growth industry in publishing.”

Marley wasn’t deaf or anorexic; he was just a Labrador retriever, although Labs also have wide appeal: They’re the most popular dog in the U.S., in fact. Grogan wrote the book in nine months, using his wacky dog as a backbone for, he says, “a tale of a family that’s starting out and growing into something.”