Even as a kid, I thought the old “Lassie” TV show from the 1960s bordered on the ridiculous.

Every week, Lassie’s owner - a small and unusually clumsy lad named Timmy - would blunder into some predicament. Maybe he’d get stuck in quicksand. Or a tree would fall on him. Or he’d be dangling off a cliff, hanging onto a root.

“Lassie,” he’d say. “Go get help. Get help, girl!”

Lassie (who was actually male, I later found out) would make a beeline for the Miller farmhouse, where Timmy’s parents would be sitting around doing nothing in particular.

“Bark, bark!” Lassie would say.

The Millers would always look puzzled.

“What’s wrong, girl? Are you hungry?”

“Bark, BARK!” Finally, a light would go off in the Millers’ dim human brains, and one of them would declare: “Oh! I’ll bet Timmy has gotten himself in some stupid predicament again. Good girl, Lassie!”

Even then, I knew dogs couldn’t really be that smart.

Carol Willoughby, however, would beg to differ - and she’d probably put her companion dog, Blake, up against Lassie in her/his prime in a battle of wits.

True, Blake isn’t perfect.

“When I ask him for the TV remote,” she said, “sometimes, he’ll bring every one in the house to me.”

Don’t you hate it when your dog is too eager to please?

Companion dogs are trained to become helpmates to people with physical disabilities. Among other tasks, they can be taught to open and close doors, turn lights on and off, push wheelchairs, fetch specific items and retrieve dropped objects. They’ll even give money to cashiers, although they normally can’t make change.

Willoughby, who spends much of her time in a wheelchair because of the ravages of rheumatoid arthritis, says she keeps her golden retriever busy.

“With the arthritis in my hands, I drop things a lot,” she said.

Willoughby spoke last week at a luncheon at the Summit, hosted by the Timbrook Woman’s Club. Blake came along, as did her husband Doug.

“Everybody just fell in love with Carol, and the dog,” said Timbrook president-elect Carol Woody.

Presumably, they liked Doug, too.

The concept of companion dogs was started, like so many things, in California. But there is no national organization, and St. Francis of Assisi is completely self-sustaining.

And growing. Two years ago, Willoughby purchased an 18-acre farm near Hollins University. They’ve since been able to hire an executive director (Cabell Youel, an attorney who left a local law firm to sign on), a trainer, and several other staff members, making the Roanoke operation one of the largest in the country.

“It used to be a horse farm,” Willoughby said. “Now, it’s a dog farm. Our plan is to turn the stables into kennels.”

Needless to say, this is not like picking up a puppy at the pound. Companion dogs are carefully screened. They have to be friendly, even-tempered, receptive to training, energetic, confident and in good physical shape - sort of like Boy Scouts.

“Our goal is to eventually breed the dogs ourselves,” Willoughby said. “When you get them from outside breeders, you’re never completely sure they’re going to fit all the requirements.”

Wheelchair-bound or not (she is able to park the chair and walk, somewhat unsteadily, while inside her house), Willoughby has a large vision and a dogged (no pun intended) determination. She went to Lewis-Gale Hospital and Central Fidelity Bank for initial seed money, got John Carlin of WSLS-TV on her board and somehow charmed the Carillion health conglomerate into donating 2,000 square feet of office space (pre-farm).

She was in Lynchburg last week because companion dogs aren’t.

“We’ve never gotten a request from over your way,” she said, “and I wanted to spread the word.”

A portrait of Booker, her first companion dog, hangs in the School of Veterinary Medicine at Virginia Tech.

“The veterinary fraternity there gives an award each year to a companion dog in Virginia,” Willoughby said, “and the award is named after Booker. He was a great dog.”

So is Blake.

“Goldens are probably the best breed for this,” Willoughby said, “but labs are good, too. Before I got Booker, I was more of a cat person.”

But try asking your cat to fetch the remote control.

“Blake can pick up something as small as a dime or as large as a crutch,” said Willoughby. “He can push elevator buttons, open my refrigerator, a lot of things you’d never expect. There are 100 dif

ferent things these dogs can be trained to do.”

Some of the dogs, like Booker, are privately trained. Others grow up with volunteer families who then give them up. There is also a program in place to raise them in prisons, started by a Catholic nun in the Midwest.

“Sometimes, they take the dogs out for awhile so they can socialize with other dogs,” Willoughby said, “but they can’t wait to get back to the prison. They see the gates, and their tails start wagging.”

As might be expected, Willoughby has lots of companion dog success stories, like that of a woman who was trapped under her heavy wheelchair and rescued when her dog went for help, a la Lassie.

“They’re trained to go to the nearest person,” Willoughby said.

Her favorite stories, though, involve kids.

“A dog is an ice-breaker,” she said. “A lot of times, people don’t know what to say to a child in a wheelchair. If they have a companion dog, they can say: “Hey, nice dog. Tell me about him.”

Individuals seeking a dog are asked to pay a $25 application fee, then $200 when the dog arrives. Unlike other such programs, they are then given ownership of the dog. All the training costs are absorbed by the foundation.