Jack Sinykin papers

John L. "Jack" Sinykin was born in 1891 in Lithuania and came to the United States in 1912. He worked with his family's successful cattle ranch and trained horses in Souta Dakota before moving to St. Paul, Minnesota. In the 1920s he founded a cosmetics firm, Cinderella Cosmetics, located in an art deco building on University Avenue in Saint Paul. Despite his ties to Hollywood and subsequent successful starlet endorsements (including publicity stills with a young Loretta Young), the business eventually folded.

In the early 1920s, Sinykin founded LaSalle Kennels in Wayzata, Minnesota and began training guide dogs, importing his first German Shepherd from Germany. He was said to have trained more than 3,000 dogs personally. Sinykin trained the very first guide dog in the United States in 1926 for Senator Thomas D. Schall, named Lux of La Salle. Sinykin worked to bring Lambert Kreimer to the United States for a period of two years; Kreimer was in charge of the German goverment school for training dogs at Munich after the first World War. Together they developed a training routine for guide dogs. Sinykin also began breeding a special strain of dogs, called the La Salle strain, building up attributes required for guide dog work. The breed is recognized by the American Kennel Clubs Association.

Sinykin founded Master Eye Foundation, a charity that paid for training guide dogs as well as for teaching blind owners how to use guide dogs. Dogs were never sold to blind persons, but were financed through fundraising and charity, and Sinykin trained dogs for people regardless of race, religion, or age. He pioneered teaching blind youth to use guide dogs, as well as those who were blind and deaf.

Sinykin had a wife, Genevive, and two sons, Marvin and Gerald. He passed away in November of 1983.