Boy’s passion to have a dog becomes path to elite honor
Published: March 2, 2006
The ambition. The self-motivation. The winner’s instinct. The lofty goals. And yes, even the charm.
It was all there, years ago. Packaged in the body and soul of a first-grade boy.
Anders Thoreson knew what he wanted. It was simple, really. All he had to do was change his parents’ minds.
Lucky for him, his dad was his teacher at Riverview Elementary School in the Snohomish area. Once or twice a week, Jeff Thoreson asked his students to write stories — which he, of course, had to read.
“He would always write about a dog. Say it was Presidents Day. He would say, ‘If I were elected president, I would get a dog,’ ” his father recalled. “Or say it was St. Patrick’s Day. He would say, ‘Well, the first thing to do to catch a leprechaun is to get a dog.’ For Halloween, he dressed up as a dog handler; he had one of those leashes that was empty at the bottom and had [an invisible] dog pulling him.”
On it went, week in and week out, until the school year ended. That summer, Anders finally got his first puppy, a golden mutt named Penny.
But the story doesn’t end there.
Two weeks ago, Anders, now 17 and a junior at Snohomish High School, was crowned the nation’s top junior handler at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show.
But not with Penny. She retired several years ago after winning the “best of mixed breed” prize at the Evergreen State Fair. For this trip, Anders took his purebred German shorthaired pointer, Topper, professionally known as Champion Shannon’s Take It to the Top VV.
On school days, Anders leaves home at 6 a.m. to practice with Snohomish High’s jazz band. He taught himself to play his dad’s trumpet in fifth grade. Then in eighth grade, he earned $1,300 to buy his own. During the cross-country and track seasons — he’s a varsity long-distance runner — he doesn’t return home until 6:30 p.m.
Evenings are busy with 4-H dog-club meetings, his church’s youth group, private trumpet lessons and playing in the school pep band at basketball games.
Weekends find him traveling all over the Northwest, showing Topper and working as a paid assistant for Scott Price, a Mount Vernon-based professional dog handler. Anders plans to earn a doctorate and become a veterinarian. Last fall, he worked part time at Everett Veterinary Hospital.
“He’s a great young man,” said his former boss, veterinarian Tom Koenig. “He’s a normal kid; he’s not a weirdo or anything.”
In his free time, Anders catches up on homework — he has a 3.87 grade-point average — and uses his Web page to keep in touch with friends that he has made throughout the dog-handling world.
“He’s spread all over the place. I have him in AP [Advanced Placement] history, too,” track coach Dan Parker said. “He pretty much puts an intense effort into whatever he’s involved in, which leads him to burn the candle on both ends sometimes.”
When he was younger, Anders also played soccer, basketball and baseball. For three years, he played the role of the boy soprano in an annual West Seattle production of “Amahl and the Night Visitors.” Last year, he mentored the latest youth to sing that part.
“He’s driven,” said his mom, Elizabeth Thoreson, a former teacher who operates a day-care center in their home in the Fobes Hill area. “As a fourth-grader, he said: ‘Mom, I have goals and dreams for my life. These other kids are holding me back. I have too much to learn, I don’t have time to go to school. Would you please home-school me?’ ”
She agreed, but with conditions. To create time for his schooling, she needed a lot of help with housework. He agreed, so for two years he studied math, art, and Greek and Latin spelling roots with his mother, took trumpet and gym classes and used the library at Riverview, and attended a weekly home-school program for literature, history and science.
“Then he decided he never was going to houseclean again, and he raced back to public school,” his mother said with a laugh. “He was ready to go back to his friends. I made him work pretty hard.”
Anders entered Centennial Middle School in seventh grade.
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