text: dog town  how the town got its name?   this follow-up appeared the next day, sept. 13, 1986.   dogtown tales:   seems as if we'll never know for sure how our dogtown got its name, but we certainly do have some good stories about its origin; it could be there's a goodly portion of truth in them all. yesterday we covered the dog eaters from the world's fair, but today we'll go back before the fair, to 1876. that's when, according to the 1937 history of cheltenham and st. james parish penned by the rev. p.j. o'connor, the area got its name "from squatters who built shacks in the neighborhood of graham and west park after they were evicted from forest park." and that's the extent of what this extensive volume on the area had to say about dogtown. but we've unearthed yet another source for the name dogtown, which goes back to the 1890s. that very believeable story will be told, possibly for the first time in print, on monday.