Note: Here’s a post I originally wrote for the 1947project back in 2005.

Pat and Gunner, 6-year-old Irish setters who were left a $30,000 estate by their late master, Carleton R. Bainbridge, retired attorney, yesterday were disinherited by a jury of eight men and four women.

The jury in the court of Superior Court Charles S. Burnell found, with one ballot, that the deceased lawyer was incompetent when he made his will last Feb. 18, two days before his death.

Attys. Harold A. and Miriam O. Fendler, representing Sherman J. Bainbridge, writer and brother of the late attorney, successfully contended that the will naming Charles F. Connelly as trustee and caretaker of the dogs, was invalid.

During the three-week hearing, friends and neighbors of the dog owner testified that he claimed the animals talked. He read them bedtime stories, according to testimony, and took the dogs to the movies, where their favorite films were “Mickey Mouse” and “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.”

Connelly was represented in the contest by Atty. Wyckoff Westover.

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Sherman J. Bainbridge, one of the leading promoters of the “Ham ‘n’ Eggs” campaign of the Depression, died in January 1950, less than three years after winning the lawsuit. He was buried at Forest Lawn in Glendale. The fates of Pat and Gunner are unrecorded.