As I explain in my profile, I have been an admirer of cats since I was a small child. Even though I was born in the Cereal Capital of the World (Battle Creek, MI) and spent the first 4 years of my life in Saginaw, Michigan, during my 4th year (1965) my parents moved our family to a farm in Lum, Michigan. Here we were given our first pets, cats. I do not know why dogs never became part of the family, but the cats were necessary to the farm, they kept the mice out of the house. The first cat in my life was a sleekly black, shy female cat I named Cynthia. She never let us get very close to her but she always hovered around the periphery of our family and the backdoor of the house. A vivid memory I have just after we moved in was when Mother, Jennifer and I had come back from grocery shopping and Mom had the back door in the kitchen propped open so we could bring in the groceries. Cynthia lurked around the door and ran away when Jennifer or I would try to get close to her. Sadly for Cynthia, she had a short life on the farm, not too long after this the farmer that rented the farm fields (Mr. John Crawford) told my parents that he'd found Cynthia dead in the bard, probably from rat poison, meaning that maybe she'd eaten a rat that was full of poison.
As I said the big farm house that we rented from the Harvey Family in Lum, Michigan, was a haven for mice. I recall trips to the basement with my father as he would pick up dead rodent carcasses (perhaps he used poison or traps in the basement), all I recall is the hunt for the dead mice. Soon after the death of Cynthia, Mom and Dad took my three sisters and myself out to look for free kittens. We found 4 lovely ones, Susan's was named Smokey, Beth Anne named her kitten, Friskey, Jennifer called her tabby male, Tiger, and I couldn't think of a name for my black and white masked female kitten. It was a good thing for me that Mother suggested I call her Top Cat or TC for short. I could write pages on TC, how she waited for me on the front porch when I came home from kindergarten, or when she'd come into the house she'd freak out and go under the sofa in the living room and was hard to remove, or Mom as says, she had a habit of climbing the large box elder tree in the backyard and getting onto the kitchen roof and wouldn't come down until my father had to go remove her.
Here you see my sisters and myself in the backyard next to the large box elder tree. The year is about 1967 or earlier. My sister Susan has taken the photo and Beth Anne, on the far left is holding her cat Friskey, Jennifer in the middle is holding Susan's cat Smokey, and I have Jennifer's Tiger. I have no memory of where my cat TC went. Perhaps she climbed the tree and got up on the kitchen roof again. This is the earliest photo I can find of me with a cat.Sadly about these 4 cats, three of them met violent ends on the highway in front of our house, meaning they were run-over by cars. My father used to explain their deaths to us, in that they would lie down on the road as it was still warm from the sun in the night and then the cars would hit them. Now as an adult I have realized that my father tried to spare us grim details and I realize that the cats were crossing the highway to get to the fields on the other side of the road and never made it across the two lane road. People used to drive very fast down Lum Road and this caused the deaths of Smokey, TC, and finally Friskey. We never know what happened to Tiger. He was an unaltered male and as they like to roam, he left one day and never returned. We were very poor when I was a child. Mom and Dad were able to have Smokey, Friskey, and TC spaded, but they never neutered Tiger.
Regarding the subject of growing up poor in my definition: we always had plenty of food and clothing, we never wanted for anything, but it seemed to me that we were poor as I recall from discussions from my father and mother on how hard it was for my father to find work the he could succeed at in the mid-1960s and there were many times where there wasn't much money. Dad had several jobs when we moved to Lum, he sold animal food to farmers at grain elevators all over the Thumb of Michigan for Monsanto and Wayne Feeds, he sold posters for a company, he worked for a manufactured home company, he was a salesman on the road and was gone for long stretches of time, until finally he found his calling in 1968 when he became afiliated with Woodmen Accident Life Insurance Company and sold life and health insurance products to people.
Smokey died first and TC was the next to go and she was killed on the road when I was in second grade and my mother told me that she had died when we were in the car on a Saturday morning, on the way from Lum to Imlay City where I would take a school bus to Flint to learn how to swim at the YWCA. I never did learn how to learn to swim that winter of 1968, the YWCA gave me a certificate saying I "neither passed nor failed" in my swimming course. (I later learned that summer how to swim and didn't need the YWCA).
Tiger disappeared sometime between 1968 and 1969 and we needed cats for the farm so Mom and Dad took all 4 of us girls on a car ride again looking for free kittens. We found 4 new kittens and brought them home and Friskey wasn't real thrilled at first with the new batch of cats. Susan named her black and white masked fluffy cat, Buffy, her tail was black and it wasn't a long, regular cat tail, but bobbed in some way. Beth Anne named her female kitten, Jeanie and she was a brown tabby, like Tiger was. My cat was an orange male tabby and again, I couldn't think of what to call him and everyone gave me great suggestions, even my father told me of a pet he'd had as a child called "Tigerlily," who I think was a dog. Jennifer named her female kitten, another black and white masked female, of duller markings like Buffy, "Fluffy."
I was in the 3rd grade and really stressed that I couldn't name my kitten and realized I had to name him something. When I went to bed that night I had a dream of the movie "Peter Pan" and there is a scene where Peter Pan saves the Princess Tigerlily. So in the morning I recalled Tigerlily and that was the name of my orange tabby kitten. This second round of cats didn't last very long like the first 4 kittens. As we were very poor, Mom and Dad could not afford to alter the male and 3 females, or perhaps they realized that these new cats might get run-over on the road like the other cats had, but these 4 new kittens were never altered. It was a very cold winter in 1969 and there was a wave of worms making it through Lum and Jeanie was the first to die. Tigerlily died just before Christmas 1969, Jeanie shortly dying just before Tigerlily. I remember going to the garage where they had their cat boxes to sleep in and he was stone cold dead curled up in his bed. My father knew how much we loved our cats so he went to the area behind the garage and dug up the cold, hard earth and we buried Tigerlily behind the garage. I chose a large orange stone in the rockfield to use as Tigerlily's grave marker.
This area was our cat cemetery, perhaps Jeanie was the first to be buried there and then Tigerlily. Jennifer's cat, Fluffy ran away, and all that was left was Susan's Buffy and Beth Anne's first cat, Friskey. Poor Friskey was next to be interred in the cat cemetery as she was run-over, the time of this event escapes my memory.
Buffy was the only cat we now had left and she was a character. She was a great mouser. She would catch rats and mice and leave only their skins on the mat outside the backdoor as a gift to our family. During the summertime Dad would make a bonfire in our gravel driveway at night and we'd all sit around it and look at the stars in the heavens or roast marshmellows and other campfire things. The next morning Buffy would roll around in the ashes and you would have to wash your hands almost immediately once you petted her. She was the the sweetest female cat I've ever known. Other times at night she'd be out doing her nighttime activities and in the morning she would be reaking of skunk scent! We always thought it was because of her markings, black and white and that she didn't know the difference between skunks and cats. Buffy was also a most promiscuous cat. She had dealings with our neighbor's cat, Buster and was the mother of 4 litters.
My poor kitten, Geraldine Josephine never survived kittenhood. One day I was faking being sick so I didn't have to go to school and my father stayed home for work to be with me. He was outside fixing his car and as it was about done and up on car ramps, he asked if I wanted to be in the car as he pushed it off the car ramps. I said sure and Dad pushed the car off the ramps and as the car went down backwards I heard a cat scream and once the car stopped Dad told me a cat had been run over. Now Dad was very upset as he knew how much we girls loved our cats (both of my parents were not "cat people" and had been raised with dogs but they knew that we as children had great love of our cats), and he described to me which cat it was and how it was Gerry. He thought she might have been resting on top of the car tire as it was on the ramp before he pushed it off. He told me he was going to have to end her misery so I ran to the shed and got out the shovel thinking he would hit her on the head (a story he'd told me as a way to end an animal's life gently) but by the time I got back to him with the shovel, he said that Gerry was already gone. We walked to the cat cemetery and he buried her there for me. I recall I didn't cry much, perhaps you get used to life and death with animals more simply living on a farm than you do in the city, but today as I write this I can still feel the thrill of that car going down slowly off the ramps and then Gerry's peircing cry of anguish and I am shedding tears profusely.
