The episode of What's My Line? with Fred Allen's last appearance did indeed air the other morning — or at least, most of it aired. As Len Wein pointed out to me, the print Game Show Network ran was devoid of its Mystery Guest spot and padded out with around seven thousand commercials. This kind of thing occasionally happens on their Black & White Overnight shows, as some of the old kinescopes are incomplete. In this case, the Mystery Guest was Dinah Shore and we don't know what became of that footage.
Meanwhile, the final word (I assume) on the matter of Fred Allen not having a dog was sent to me by "Booksteve." He writes…
Not to stretch this out even further but, according to Robert Taylor's 1989 Fred Allen bio, Broadway columnist Leonard Lyons was one of the folks who happened on Allen after his attack and made the assumption (apparently in his column) that Fred had been walking a dog. The book points out that this was erroneously reported as fact ever after by researchers who didn't realize Fred Allen's dislike of the canine species and presumed Lyons knew what he was talking about. Apparently Gil Fates was citing Lyons or one of these other sources.
Leonard Lyons had a pretty bad track record when it came to knowing what he was talking about, as did most of the Broadway columnists of the time. His column was called "The Lyons Den" but many referred to it as "The Liar's Den." In any case, there's the original source of my erroneous impression, and we can now move on to less important topics — like war in Iraq, war in Korea, Michael Jackson's voodoo curses…