A Modern Mobile Profession: Making Spot Spotless

Allen Kujak, a burly former Chicago ironworker, held the shivering miniature poodle lovingly in his left arm as he clipped the 7-year-old’s toenails.

“Buttons likes to nibble, huh, Buttons?” Kujak cooed, nuzzling the pet with his mustache. Then Buttons snapped, sinking fine teeth into Kujak’s thick finger.

“Ow! Damn!” Kujak yelped, spinning from the grooming table.

Scruffy, a chocolate-brown and white Shih Tzu--eyes as big as water dishes--stared from his flea dip bath as the wounded Kujak nearly fell out of his van onto a customer’s driveway in Anaheim.

Have clippers, will travel. That is the marketing idea behind Four Paws-Mobile Pet Grooming, a business started about three years ago by Kujak’s wife, JoAnne. For $22.50 per pet, the Kujaks will drop by a customer’s house in one of two modified vans to trim, clip, bathe and douse a dog.

If requested, they’ll even put polish on your pointer’s nails, “but nobody paints toenails anymore,” said JoAnne Kujak, 32, putting a bow on the newly buffed Scruffy. Business is good. Four Paws, one of about a dozen such operations in Orange County, is booked solid for the holidays. And yes, they do cats.

Authorities on fuzzy pets, the Kujaks have a couple of theories to explain their popularity.

First is the dog boom. The county is home to many retired people whose children have moved away, and young professionals too busy with careers to tend babies.

Dogs, JoAnne Kujak said, are “a child substitute. People really love their animals.”

Customers with older dogs especially appreciate the take-out service, said Allen Kujak, 37. “There’s more tender loving care our way.”

Some pet groomers “wash 10 dogs at one time and stick them in a cage to dry all day,” he said. “Old dogs can’t take the pressure. With all those barking dogs in one cage, they get anxious. When a poodle gets to be about 12 or 13, he gets grumpy.”

Better grumpy, though, than snappy.

As a calling, pet grooming has its hazards.

Pit bullterriers and Doberman pinschers are pussycats, Allen Kujack said. It’s the Rottweilers and chow chows that scare him.

“I got a muzzle on a chow chow and had to wrestle him in here,” the 20-year ironworker said. “But I got the job done.”

A Rottweiler “with a head bigger than mine” once chased JoAnne Kujak out of her van, which she quickly locked behind her. “I asked the owner to please get her dog out of my van,” she said.

JoAnne Kujak, an easygoing woman clearly in charge of the show, had been working with animals in pet shops and kennels for almost seven years before starting Four Paws. Her husband pitched in at the beginning to help her struggling business but kept his $40,000-a-year job as a union “rod-buster” to keep the family going.

Recalling his ironworking days, Kujak said he used to get up at 4:30 a.m., work all day and then down beers with the guys after hours. “I don’t miss it, he said. “There wasn’t enough time for the kids and family.”

Now he doesn’t even hear the alarm clock go off in the morning. “It’s a whole different ballgame working for yourself,” he said. “If you don’t get your butt out of bed, there’s no one but yourself to answer to.”

Kujak said his new job’s 70-hour weeks don’t bother him. “When it’s your own business, you don’t care,” he said. “And I don’t think you could do this if you didn’t like animals.”

He wasn’t so sure about the mutt business at first.

“I had a fear of dogs, no kidding,” Kujak said. “When I had a paper route as a boy, this big German shepherd jumped out of a door once (and bit him).”

But by “just hanging in there and doing it,” Kujak overcame his fear of dogs and joined the business full time in January.

At times, though, he can get jumpy. “Honey, remember that one-eyed dog that burped in the tub?” he asked his wife over the sound of blow dryers.

“Yeah,” JoAnne Kujak said. “Allen thought it had growled, so he ran out the door. The dog sat there and looked like he was smiling.”

Herbert J. Vida is on vacation.