The dog days are over: Another autumn, another school year. And, as Post cover artist Stevan Dohanos captures it in this cover illustration from September 2, 1944, another parting of kids and their dogs. Their long summer months of companionship are over, and the children’s pets must gaze wonderingly while they receive farewell waves. Dohanos was a master of realistically capturing scenes of everyday life in America, though the children on the bus seem unrealistically happy to be heading off to school.
This article is featured in the September/October 2026 issue of The Saturday Evening Post.
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Comments
Dohanos is definitely one of the Post’s greatest artists, as this cover ‘illustrates’. Nearly everything is wonderful about it. The dogs, the background and sky, the mailboxes and the bus itself.
But you’re right about the children on the bus being unrealistically happy (to the point of annoyance, frankly) about going back to school, and leaving the dogs behind like this. I wish he’d drawn them looking sad, or at least disappointed about it. Maybe he did so to cheer the kids up at home that would see the cover?