Dewey's Nine Lives: The Legacy of the Small-Town Library Cat Who Inspired Millions

by Vicki Myron

  “There were too many ghosts,” he said of his decision to leave Sioux City. “Too many people running around thinking they knew something. I just got tired.”

  In Florida, Glenn worked construction, until the owner of the gym where he worked out, seeing how popular he was, offered him a job. Within a year, he was managing the place: selling memberships, changing pool filters, repairing the hot tub. He went to classes for six months and became a certified massage therapist. He worked seven days a week, not just for the money but because he was a blue-collar guy from Sioux City, Iowa, and he loved hard work.

  When the investors pulled out, and the health club shut down, Glenn moved his family to Texas, where a friend had a contract to repaint the Dallas city schools. He was thirty-five years old, and he didn’t have a single key on his key ring. No house. No apartment. No bank account. He didn’t even own a car. But he had the important things: a wife, a new baby son, and a family dog. It was never about the job for Glenn Anderson. He could be happy doing just about anything. It was about having a family. They were all Glenn needed to feel at home.

  But Texas wasn’t home. Florida had never been home either. Not really. Home was Sioux City, Iowa, where his parents had eventually purchased a small white house on a busy corner, and his kids from his first marriage were growing up in his old four-bedroom split-level ranch without him. After a few years, when the painting contract expired, Glenn and his new family moved back to northwest Iowa: back to the cold winters, the hard granite, and the questions from old friends. He went back to his old line of work, repairing cars. His wife drove regularly to visit her parents in Michigan, always taking their son along. The trips were a financial hardship, and he missed his boy terribly, but Glenn didn’t mind since it kept his wife happy. He was a year away, he figured, from the white picket fence, the big backyard, and the family home.

  Her cousin was the one who spilled the beans. “She’s seeing her old high school boyfriend, you know,” the cousin told him. “She never got over him.”

  Glenn didn’t know. Despite the collapse of his first marriage, Glenn Albertson was still too honest and trusting to consider the possibility that his second wife was cheating on him, too.

  At least this time, he was warned. When his wife told him she was moving to Michigan and taking their child, Glenn didn’t ask why. He didn’t fight for his boy because he knew from experience that was a battle he couldn’t win. They just split the sheets and moved on.

  He tried one more time. This time he married a friend, a woman he had known for more than ten years. He might have loved her, and she said she loved him, so marrying her seemed like a good thing to do. They weren’t young, so they started trying to have a child right away. After a few years of heartache and stress, she got pregnant. Then she lost the baby. For a month, they held each other and cried. Then the doctor told them she wouldn’t get another chance; they would never have a child of their own. It was devastating news.

  They took in foster children, infants and young kids but also older kids who had been shuffled through the system and were desperate to form attachments to someone. Foster parenting was rewarding, but it was also hard. Glenn would dedicate himself to a child, work to create safety and security and a feeling of family, become strongly bonded and invested in his or her life, and then watch the child ushered away, often for reasons he couldn’t comprehend. They fostered eleven children. Eleven stints of joy; eleven heartbreaks. The twelfth, they decided to adopt. She was a full-blood Sioux, born to a young mother unable to care for her, and Glenn was at the hospital the day she entered the world. As soon as he saw her, he knew she was the one. His heart just opened and gobbled her up. His wife knew it, too. This is what she had been waiting for: a daughter of her own. They named her Jenny, and when they held her, it was like the world closed around them and was complete.

  Or so Glenn thought. He didn’t understand the real state of his marriage until he came home early one day and overheard his wife talking to her mother in the kitchen.

  “I don’t need him now,” he heard his wife say.

  “Then get rid of him,” her mother replied. “You have your daughter, and you can get his money. What more do you want?”

  “Nothing.”

  With that one word, another door slammed shut on Glenn Albertson, in his life and in his heart. He was fifty years old, he had been married to three women for a total of twenty-four years, and what did he have to show for it? All his life, he had wanted nothing more than love, nothing more than a family. I’m not going to do it anymore, he told himself. He was done.

  There are a million ways for a man to get knocked down. Not down for the count, but knocked down hard enough that when he gets back up, he isn’t the man he was before. Maybe he’s better. Maybe he’s worse. Maybe he’s worse for a while, then he gets better, and he ends up better than he ever would have been. Or maybe he gets up staggering, wounded beyond repair. After all, if there are a million ways to get knocked down, there are at least a thousand ways to get back up.

  You think about things like that in northwest Iowa, a region that’s been knocked down more than a few times over the years. In my lifetime, the biggest blow was to the family farm. My father was a proud descendant of a line of farmers, but in the 1950s the advent of enormous threshers and reapers changed both the nature and finances of farming. Unable to afford the big machines, our production held steady against falling prices, undercutting our family’s foundation. Eventually, my father was forced to sell out to a neighbor, who cut down our trees, knocked down our house, and plowed under our land.

  In Sioux City, the same forces—the consolidation and industrialization of farming and ranching—caused changes almost as drastic. When the Missouri River was the primary artery of the Upper Midwest, the town was a major transportation hub, a rough-and-tumble crossroads where cowboys and boat captains met whiskey and women. The stockyards were some of the busiest in the world, and even in a town of 120,000 people, the cows often outnumbered the citizens ten to one. The slaughter-boss mansions on Rose Hill were built of solid granite, but so were the churches. Even Central High School, built of Sioux Falls granite in 1893, was a castle, complete with towers and turrets.

  But after World War II, the Missouri River began to lose its pull. Highways replaced railroads and steamboats, decentralizing agricultural production and driving ranchers and farmers closer to their home fields. The town flooded repeatedly, until a major project was finally undertaken to change the flow of the tributaries meeting the Missouri. The slaughter business declined, along with the factories that supported it and, eventually, the population. Sioux City shrank from 120,000 people to 100,000, then down to 90,000. The airport closed a gate, dropping to a few flights a day. In time, the downtown would be revitalized and Lower Fourth Street turned into a high-end shopping and entertainment district, with even the former El Forastero motorcycle clubhouse converted to pricey condominiums. But outside downtown, the ice still cracked the steep roads, no matter how often they were repaved, and the Arctic wind tore through the storefronts on Pierce Street. Most of the Rose Hill mansions were cut up into apartments. Sioux Tools closed down. The bakery on the corner across from Glenn’s parents’ house became a late-night convenience store, its lights blaring out over the shoddy gas pumps until 3:00 A.M. Glenn’s father, a hard-drinking, hard-laughing, hardworking man of old Sioux City, developed an inoperable tumor on his liver.

  Years earlier, before Glenn had his own family, his father had moved out. Glenn never knew why; he assumed it had something to do with alcohol. For a while, he thought he’d never see his father again. But when Glenn Albertson, Sr., came back three years later, he was a new man. Still a drinker and a worker, but kinder and more understanding. More appreciative of what he had at home. He romanced his wife into falling in love with him again, remarried her, and they were happy for the rest of his life. He won over his son again—Glenn had always loved his father, no matter what—and now cherished their relationship.
Even when he was away in Florida and Texas, Glenn called his father every week. After his third divorce, they started a painting business together, often sharing hotel rooms for weeks at a time. They painted McGuire Air Force Base in Trenton, New Jersey. They painted the high school in Madison, Nebraska, including Glenn’s beautiful freehand mural of a dragon, the school’s mascot. When he saw Donnelly Marketing in South Sioux City, Glenn thought they’d never finish. The building was a block square and three stories high, without windows. Working side by side, just the two of them, they finished the job in only three months, complete with hand-lettering.

  But the most important job Glenn ever worked was painting his father’s beloved 1984 Buick LeSabre after a hailstorm. For a week, Glenn banged out every dent while his father leaned against the wall and watched. He painted the car burgundy, slowly and exactly, even removing the gold pinstripe his father hated and replacing it with a metallic maroon. When Glenn was done, his father took the car out and showed it to all his friends. He was so amazed at what his son had done—so proud—that he wanted everyone to see it. Glenn had fought for approval all his life, and he’d finally won it at forty. A few years later, Glenn Albertson, Sr., died.

  Shortly thereafter, Glenn moved in with his mother. They were both in transition: Christel Albertson from life as a wife, Glenn from decades of trying to be a husband and father. Glenn ran errands for his mother, made repairs around the house, and occasionally cooked a meal, even though his mother was by far the best cook in the neighborhood. His room was a monk’s cell, as he called it: a bed, a dresser, no radio or television, nothing on the walls. At night, he played guitar, fingering the frets for a few minutes while he developed those old calluses, the ones that help you bend the chords. During the day, he worked on New Car Row, the three blocks of Sixth Street between the railroad tracks where all the car dealerships had their showrooms. As the years passed, he worked at almost every dealership on the strip, taking comfort in the routine of inspecting, diagnosing, taking apart, and putting together. And if a Porsche had to be driven fast every now and then, just to test it for a client, well then, Glenn never complained.

  He saw his adopted daughter, Jenny, every Sunday for church, followed by whatever the little girl wanted—ice cream, a walk in the park, a carousel ride. He called his other children, sent them cards on their birthdays, tried to stay in touch, but they rarely returned his calls. He felt the shame of their denial of his love, and he took his share of the blame for failing to be the father he had always meant to be. Eventually, when his guitar didn’t give him the answers he was looking for, he started counseling. He became a regular at a support group for divorced fathers, sitting in the smoke of a dozen cigarettes and hearing stories of other fathers who had been thrown out . . . or who had thrown it away. He spoke slowly, in a deep voice, offering comfort more than advice, and rarely discussing his own circumstances. One night, he mentioned that playing music had been one of the great joys of his life, and the nun who ran the group asked him to bring his guitar. He played in front of an audience, a group of misplaced husbands and forgotten fathers, for the first time in years.

  Soon after, while jogging with a neighbor’s dog down a country road, he noticed a flatbed truck edging into a grove of trees.

  “What’s going on?” he asked the driver.

  “Farmer’s got an old car in there. We’re going to cut down some trees, haul her out, take her to the crusher.”

  Glenn recognized the rusted shell: a 1953 Studebaker Commander. Seeing those curved lines, even half hidden in the trees, brought back childhood memories. Not of Sioux City, where Glenn spent the school year, but of his grandmother’s rural hometown of Pierce, Nebraska, where he had spent his summers. Pierce was a sleepy crossroads town of less than a thousand people, the kind of place where the men drove jalopies, the women baked pies, and the neighbor across the street from his grandmother’s house still mowed his lawn with a team of horses. From any room in his grandmother’s house, Glenn could hear the whistle of the steam train when it approached the intersection in the center of town, and he would run to watch it pass in a cloud of smoke. As much as he was Sioux City granite, Glenn Albertson was summers in Pierce: the long ride on his bike to the fishing hole; the rumble of the cars on the cobblestone streets; the town’s one big tree; the town’s one cop; the closeness of a people that knew each other (and were often related, if not by blood, then by their German heritage) and pulled through life together, working a neighbor’s farm one summer when the man fell sick and never asking for a dime.

  His grandmother spent her days in the kitchen, talking to Glenn in a steady patter that mixed German and English the way her hands mixed flour and butter. She was never comfortable with English, so Glenn wrote her letters that she read over and over to study the language. The afternoons were spent waiting for his grandfather. Even in his sixties, the man worked long days as a carpenter, and if the first thing he did when he arrived home was grab a Salem cigarette and water the garden, Glenn knew he was worn out. If he left his 1941 Studebaker in the driveway instead of the garage, Glenn knew they were going fishing. Glenn would hold the poles, the ends sticking out the window and his dog, Spook, barking in the backseat as the gray Studebaker stormed down the dusty country roads.

  When Glenn wasn’t in his grandmother’s kitchen, he was next door at the auto repair shop. Watching the mechanic there dismantle motors, Glenn fell in love with cars. By ten, he was driving his grandfather’s Studebaker. By twelve, he knew exactly how the car worked. Across the street from the repair shop was a salvage yard, owned by the mechanic’s brother, and Glenn would ride along on trips to tow tractors and trucks out of backfields and break them down for parts. One day, the tow truck passed a car lot and there, shining in the sun, was a 1953 Studebaker Commander. Someday I’m gonna get one of those, Glenn promised himself.

  It wasn’t just the idea of owning a sporty car, something that said “I’m a man” to every right-minded American boy. It was the idea of making it, of being successful, of living a life a boy would be proud of. But it was also, all those years later on a country road outside Sioux City, the idea of home. There was something about a 1953 Studebaker Commander that was tied up with memories of apple strudel and fishing holes and Spook the dog in his little wagon being pulled behind a young boy’s bike.

  “I want that car,” Glenn told the driver of the flatbed truck.

  “I don’t think so, friend,” the driver said. “That car is rusted through. Hasn’t run in years.”

  “I still want it,” Glenn said. A few hours later, the Commander was sitting in a garage just down the street from Glenn’s mother’s house. That afternoon, Glenn must have circled it twenty times, just following the lines with his eyes. It was as bad as the flatbed driver had said. Maybe worse. Glenn knew he’d found the project of a lifetime.

  The first thing he did was sand off the rust. There’s nothing like an outer layer of neglect, that old dead skin, to make a car seem beyond repair. Chip away the rust, and you know what you have left. Holes can be fixed easier than people imagine. You just have to take the time to figure out where they are and how deep they go. Glenn took the time. He ground every spot of rust, until he was staring at the metal below. Then he repaired the holes. The 1953 Studebaker Commander is a mid-century sportster, reminiscent of the cars Sean Connery drove in the old James Bond movies, and Glenn bonded and sanded the car until the body was smoothly curved and secret-agent sleek.

  He removed the engine. Then he dismantled the block so that the bent, broken, and rusted pieces could be inspected and thrown out if need be. He worked slowly, attending his divorced-fathers meetings in the evenings, fingering his guitar at night, saving his money for parts. He bought intake valves from an old Ford; exhaust valves from an Oldsmobile; pistons from a vintage Chevrolet. He’d walk out of the garage, light a cigarette, and stare into the night sky, thinking of his grandmother’s kitchen and his father’s beloved Buick. After a while, he’d snuff his butt and
head back to work, grinding down fenders or scrubbing out cylinders. He worked every crevice, checked every flap and valve. It took more than a year, but when the engine block went back into the Studebaker, it was completely rebuilt and spotless.

  His next task was to hook it all up. The drive shaft, crank shaft, wheel axles, steering column, everything had to work together. Glenn scrubbed out and rebuilt the connections bolt by bolt and joint by joint. Two years into the project, the key turned in the ignition, the engine revved, and the wheels rolled. He took the car to the corner store. He drove it to a divorced-fathers meeting, his guitar shoved in the backseat, and showed it off to his daughter Jenny, although he wouldn’t take her for a drive. Not yet—the car was still too dangerous. There were brake lights but only a partial electrical system, no paint on the sanded body. It may not have been pretty—not yet—but the Studebaker could breathe again.

  A few weeks later, Glenn was under the dashboard, humming to himself and working on the wiring, when he felt something drop onto his chest. He looked up—nearly banging his head on the underside of the dash—straight into the eyes of an orange and white cat. The kitten was small, probably six or seven weeks old, and he was staring at Glenn with his head cocked to the side. Glenn had no idea where the kitten came from, but there was something about the color of his fur that reminded him of the Studebaker when they pulled it out of the weeds.

  “Well, hey, Rusty, how are you?” he said, petting the kitten softly on the head.

  The cat nuzzled Glenn’s palm. Then it went back to staring. Finally, it lay down on Glenn’s chest and began to purr. After a minute, Glenn shrugged and went back to work, the banging of tools and Rusty’s rolling purr the only sounds in the empty garage.