There are 8 million occupational stories in New York City, and none cries Gotham louder than that of the professional surrogate — the shrewd city dweller who spies a void that other New Yorkers are too hurried, harried or hard-pressed to fill and rushes enterprisingly in.

Over time, the city has spawned professional car-movers and professional line-standers, but its most visible — and audible — paid surrogates are indisputably its professional dog walkers.

By all accounts, Jim Buck was the first of them.

Buck, who died July 4 at 81, is widely described as having been the first person to professionalize dog walking in New York City and, by extension, in the United States.

Starting in the early 1960s, Buck, the scion of a patrician Upper East Side family, rose each morning at dawn to walk passels of clients’ dogs, eventually presiding over a business in which he and two dozen assistants walked more than 150 dogs a day.

When he began that business, Jim Buck’s School for Dogs, it was the only one of its kind in New York. Today, the city has scores of professional dog walkers.

During the 40 years Buck ran his school, he was an eminently recognizable figure: an elegantly turned out, borzoi-thin man of 145 pounds, he commanded the leashes of a half-dozen or more dogs at a time — a good 500 pounds of dog in all — which fanned out before him like the spokes of a wheel.

Jim Buck’s School for Dogs was equal parts exclusive preparatory academy, exercise class and reform school. In a 1964 profile of Buck in The New York Times, Gay Talese described him, plying his trade, as looking “like Charlton Heston in the chariot-racing scene in ‘Ben-Hur.’”

With hindsight, though, it is more apt to liken Buck to Lee Marvin in the 1967 film “The Dirty Dozen.”

Buck’s clients were refined. Their dogs were less so.

The clients, mostly Upper East Siders, included some of the city’s most prominent names in the arts, government, finance and industry. (Continuing the tradition of walker-client confidentiality to which Buck long hewed, his family declined to name them. They did confirm Buck’s death, at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center in Manhattan, of apparent complications of emphysema and cancer.)

The dogs included the intractable, the obstinate and the profoundly pampered.

Footloose, determined and eager to flout convention, Buck bypassed college.

But by the early ’60s he was leading the sort of gray-flannel life of which he despaired, chafing in New York as a salesman for an electronics concern.

Buck knew dogs — as a young man, he bred Great Danes. He also knew New Yorkers. Before long, a void was filled. By 1964, The Times reported, he was making $500 a week, more than his electronics job paid.