We are certainly in the middle of the dog days of summer right now. But in one Adams Morgan neighborhood, every day is a dog's day. And that dog's name is Romo.
This pooch has become a beloved local celebrity in D.C. He is so well known that he is often called “The King of Adams Morgan.” But sadly for many, all of that is about to change.
Tiffany Bacon fell in love with Romo the moment she met the 4-week-old pup. He was the only one in his litter to survive a puppy mill.
“We thought he was a boxer and then he just kept growing and growing, and 150 pounds later, we have biggest baby in the entire world,” Bacon said.
Bacon's fiancé Peter Scourby fell in love with her first and then quickly lost his heart to her giant bullmastiff and pit bull mix too.
“When I met Tiffany, obviously she's beautiful, successful, she was a cheerleader for the Redskins, but with every good woman, there is a catch,” Scourby told us. “And unbeknownst to me, the catch was she had a 150-pound rhinoceros living with her.”
This D.C. couple loves their dog enough to let him take over their bed and watch television when they are not home.
But they never realized that one day when they opened the front window of their Adams Morgan home that the rest of the city would come to love him too.
“He just kind of got up and nudged his little head underneath there [at the window] and just sat down,” said Bacon. “Of course it was petrifying. It's like, ‘Oh my God, I think he is going to jump out.' So we closed [the window] and kept it lower and he'd just nudge it open when we weren't looking and he's never even tried to jump out. He is just happy as can be.”
It turns out when you open Romo's window, the fans will come.
“There were just flashes of light -- ‘Pop, pop, pop, pop' -- and it was people taking pictures of Romo,” Bacon said.
Through the years, this pooch has developed quite a following. He has quickly become not just the top dog in the family -- but at their street, their neighborhood and even the city.
“He's absolutely priceless,” said one resident.
Maybe it is his fabulously droopy face and chill manner or it could be the way he seems to defy gravity and lean a good 100 pounds of his heft out the window so he doesn't miss a thing.
“Sometimes I think he's human, just sitting out window looking out, looking at neighborhood, looking at people go by,” said a FedEx driver in the area. “He's a cool dog.”
He is so popular that fans have created Facebook and Twitter accounts for him and his owners have discovered people selling pictures of him on everything from postcards to fancy framed art.
“It's really special and amazing and weird that what we love so much has become so loved by so many other people,” said Bacon.
Romo spends hours every day looking out of his window, so it is probably not going to go over too well when word gets out that he and his owners are moving to the suburbs in the fall.
Scourby promised to work like a dog to find just the right spot.
“We're going to try to find him a window,” he said. “I want to find closets. She wants to find a window Romo can hang out of.”
Bacon is just hoping they won't be in the doghouse with their neighbors.
“It's going to make me sad that we're going to take him from the neighborhood, but we'll bring him to Virginia and hopefully he'll earn a whole new following there,” she said.
If you are wondering about his name, Bacon is a former captain of the Washington Redskins cheerleaders and an ex-boyfriend of hers is a Dallas Cowboys fan who named him after the quarterback of the team. By the way, Scourby is a Giants fan.
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