I enjoyed Barbara Trainin Blank’s article, “Wags & Worksheets” immensely in the May 2013 issue of TheBurg (p. 16). Started smiling about halfway through as the memories started flooding back about the office cat.
It was 1959, and I was just out of Uncle Sam’s Army and working as a reporter/photographer for The Progress, Clearfield, Pa.’s daily newspaper. The boss called me in one day and said he had a problem. The Progress also owned the old (founded in 1827) Centre Democrat weekly newspaper in Bellefonte. They had a young editor there named Don Shoemaker who had muscular dystrophy and had just also developed multiple sclerosis on top of it and needed an extra pair of legs to get around and do stories and take pictures. Would I be willing to go over to Bellefonte and fill in for the rest of the summer before I went back to Penn State?
My answer was “yes,” and, very shortly, I was assigned an old, beat-up desk in what passed as the newsroom.
After being there for a few weeks, I discovered a column called “The Office Cat,” which appeared mysteriously every week in time to be typeset and under a header with a strange-looking black cat. I quizzed editor Don and, with a rye smile, he said, “Don’t you know, every old weekly newspaper had an office cat.” When I asked him why, he simply smiled and said, “Mice eat paper . . . cats eat mice.”
Our Centre Democrat office cat had a strange kind of humor and, each week, he (or she) wrote up some good-natured barbs about prominent people in Bellefonte and Centre County and sprinkled in some of the dirtiest jokes imaginable.
It was during my second summer at the Centre Democrat that I learned it was indeed editor Don who penned the column each week and, once a year, during a trip to New York City, he would go down to a shop in Greenwich Village and get a couple more dirty joke books to keep the office cat current.
Now, you will have to fast-forward with me to June 1, 1970, when my wife Rosemary and I purchased the Hummelstown Sun here in Dauphin County.
We inherited a great staff in the form of three Hartwell brothers, George, Richard and Cliff, one additional compositor and . . . an office cat!
Yes, he was the real thing. He was a big tomcat named (don’t ask me why) Grayco, and he sort of moped around the office most of the time. But, Wednesday night, when we were addressing the papers and bagging them for the post office, he would assume his perch above we mere humans and supervise the entire operation, mewing occasionally when something apparently didn’t suit him.
Grayco was up in age and, about three years later, he went to cat heaven. We weren’t without an office cat for long as, one summer day, a slightly smaller and much younger tomcat walked in the open back door, look around and decided to stay. He was a beauty, and a cat-loving paper salesman told us he was a perfectly marked tabby, and we should show him. That wasn’t in the cards as we had no papers on him. He was definitely a “people cat” and the Cub Scouts and Brownies who toured The Sun office and backshop made him the highlight of their visit.
We named him Grayco II, and he was a fixture for several years until, one year, when we closed for our vacation week, someone stole him. We suspected a neighborhood little old lady, and the kid who swept out the shop every night swore he saw Grayco II looking out her front window.
When people stopping in the office discovered we had lost Grayco II, we soon were presented with a young female cat as a replacement. She was a nearly perfectly marked tiger cat, and our kids, much into “Winnie the Pooh” at the time, named her Tigger. She moved right in, and her favorite place to park was in my “in” box on the front desk.
Tigger was with us for several years, but, one cold winter spell, she just simply disappeared.
We had gotten so used to having a furry friend around that we were in a sort of funk and, in mid-winter, didn’t quite know where to look for a new office cat candidate. This was quickly solved for us when a young lady who ran a dog-boarding kennel came in to place an ad. When she heard Tigger was gone, she left quickly and, just as quickly, returned with a large box from which a lovely snow-white female cat peered out at us. The dog kennel lady informed us she had shown up on her doorstep during the height of the blizzard, and she didn’t know what to do with her, as her dogs didn’t constitute much of a welcoming committee.
We took a quick vote and all agreed she should stay with us and, thus, the lovely and loving snow-white female joined the newspaper staff.
Her name? What better than Blizzard (Bliz for short), and she settled in for a long stay, passing away from a heart attack just a few months before Rosemary and I retired in November 2007.
So, as author Trainin Blank proclaims, pets in the office are now all the rage. However, for those of us who toiled over our career in small weekly newspapers of the land, it’s nothing new.
The “office cat” has been around for more than 200 years.
William S. Jackson is the former owner and publisher of the Hummelstown Sun.
