Dewey: the Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World

by Vicki Myron

  I had been telling the interpreter all morning that people came from all over the United States to visit Dewey, but I don’t think Mr. Hoshi believed me. Then, just after lunch, in walked a family from New Hampshire. Talk about timing! The family was at a wedding in Des Moines and decided to rent a car and drive up to see Dewey. Need I remind you that’s a three-and-a-half-hour drive?

  Mr. Hoshi was all over the visitors. He interviewed them extensively. He took footage of them shooting their own footage of Dewey with their camcorder (probably manufactured in Japan). I taught the girl, who was five or six, the Dewey Carry, and how to gently rock back and forth until he put his head down on her back and closed his eyes. The family stayed an hour; the Japanese crew left soon after. As soon as they were gone, Dewey fell asleep and was out the rest of the day.

  We received two copies of the DVD. After sixteen years, I was reluctant to talk about Dewey too much, but this seemed special. I called the newspaper. The electronics store on the corner loaned us a giant projection television, and we packed the library. By this time, Dewey had been on the radio in Canada and New Zealand. He had appeared in newspapers and magazines in dozens of countries. His photograph had been all over the world. But this was different. This was worldwide television!

  I had sneaked a peak at the video, so I was a little nervous. The documentary turned out to be an alphabetic trip through the world of cats. There were twenty-six featured cats, one for each letter of the alphabet. Yes, our alphabet, even though the documentary was in Japanese.

  I told the audience, “There are a lot of other cats in this documentary. Dewey is near the end, and the whole thing is in Japanese, so let’s take a vote. Should we fast-forward to Dewey’s part or watch the whole thing?”

  “Watch the whole thing! Watch the whole thing!”

  Ten minutes late the crowd was shouting, “Fast-forward! Fast-forward!” Let’s just say it was extremely boring to watch jump cuts of cats and interviews in Japanese. We stopped for especially cute cats, or every time there was an American on screen—we stopped twice for that reason, but one of the women turned out to be British—but most of the footage was of Japanese people and their pets.

  When we hit the letter W, a cry went up around the room, no doubt waking the snoozers. There was our Dewey, along with the words Working Cat in English and Japanese. There I was walking up to the library in the rain, while the announcer said something in Japanese. We understood only three words: “America, Iowa-shun, Spencer.” Another loud cheer. A few seconds later we heard: “Dewey a-Deedamore Booksa.”

  And there was Dewey, sitting at the front door (I have to admit, a wave would have been nice), followed by Dewey sitting on a bookshelf, Dewey walking through two bookshelves, Dewey sitting, and sitting, and sitting and being petted by a little boy under a table and . . . sitting. One and a half minutes, and it was over. No little girl with Dewey on her lap. No riding the shoulder. No book cart. No family from New Hampshire. They didn’t even use the shot of Dewey walking on top of the bookshelf, slaloming between the books, and jumping off the end. They came halfway around the world for a minute and a half of sitting.

  Silence. Stunned silence.

  And then a huge burst of cheering. Our Dewey was an international star. Here was the proof. So what if we didn’t have a clue what the announcer was saying? So what if Dewey’s portion lasted barely longer than a typical commercial break? There was our library. There was our librarian. There was our Dewey. And the announcer definitely said, “America, Iowa-shun, Spencer.”

  The town of Spencer has never forgotten that Japanese documentary. Maybe its contents. We have two copies for checkout in the library, but nobody ever watches them. Puss in Books is much more popular. But the fact that a film crew came from Tokyo to Spencer, that’s something we’ll never forget. The local radio station and the newspaper both ran long features, and for months people came into the library to talk about it.

  “What was the crew like?”

  “What did they do?”

  “Where did they go while in town?”

  “What else did they film?”

  “Can you believe it?”

  “Can you believe it?”

  “Can you believe it?”

  Japanese television put Dewey over the top. Even today, when locals talk about Dewey, the conversation always comes around to, “And those Japanese people came here, to Spencer, to film him.” What more needs to be said?

  Spencer residents aren’t the only ones who remember that documentary. After it aired, we received several letters from Japan and forty requests for Dewey postcards. Our library Web site tallies the origin of visitors, and every month since the documentary aired in the summer of 2004 Japan has been the second most popular country of origin, after the United States—more than 150,000 visitors in three years. Somehow, I don’t think they’re interested in checking out books.

  But the Japanese invasion wasn’t the only special thing that happened during the summer of 2003, at least for me. The previous year, Scott had proposed to Jodi on Christmas Eve at my parents’ house. She asked me to take charge of the flowers and decorations, since both were hobbies of mine.

  But there was something nagging at me. My sister, Val, was Jodi’s maid of honor, and I knew the two of them were discussing dresses. I didn’t have a chance to choose my own wedding dress. A girl in Hartley had called off her wedding at the last minute, and Mom bought her dress for me. I wanted more than anything to help Jodi pick her wedding dress. I wanted the dress to be special. I wanted to be a part of it. I called Jodi and said, “I’ve dreamed all my life of helping you pick out your wedding dress. Val has two daughters of her own. She’ll have her chance.”

  “I would love to do this with you, Mom.”

  My heart leaped into my throat. I could tell by the quiver in Jodi’s voice that she felt it, too. We are both sentimental fools.

  But I’m also practical. “You narrow down the choices,” I told her. “When you find half a dozen you like, I’ll drive there to help you make the final decision.” Jodi could never make up her mind about clothes. She kept most of her garments in their original boxes, because she was always returning them. Jodi lived more than three hours away in Omaha, Nebraska, and I didn’t want to kill myself making that drive every weekend for the next six months.

  Jodi shopped for dresses with her friends. Weeks later I drove to Omaha to help her make the final decision. We couldn’t decide. Then we spotted one she’d never tried on. As soon as we saw her in the dress, we knew. Jodi and I stood in the dressing room together and cried.

  We went shopping together a few months later, and she chose a beautiful dress for me. Then Jodi called me and said, “I just bought a dress for Grandma.”

  “That’s funny,” I told her. “I was in Des Moines on library business, and I bought her one, too.” When we got together, we realized we had bought Mom the same dress on the same day at the same time. We really laughed about that one.

  The wedding took place in July at St. Joseph Catholic Church in Milford, Iowa. Jodi planned the wedding from Omaha; I did the legwork. My old friends from Mankato, Trudy, Barb, Faith, and Idelle, came down a few days before the ceremony to help me set up. Jodi and I were perfectionists; we didn’t want a flower out of place. Trudy and Barb were nervous wrecks when we decorated Mom and Dad’s garage for the reception, but they did a beautiful job. When they finished, it didn’t even resemble a garage. The next day we decorated the church, then the restaurant for the rehearsal dinner.

  There were thirty-seven guests at the wedding, just family members and close friends. My friends didn’t attend the ceremony; they were in a back room heating butterflies. The butterflies were supposed to be kept on ice, in suspended animation, then warmed up and “awoken” fifteen minutes before being called upon to fly. Faith called herself the BBBBB—the Beautiful Big-Boobed Butterfly Babysitter—but she took her job quite seriously. She was so nervous about the butterflies, the night before the wedding sh
e took them to Trudy’s house in Worthington, Minnesota, an hour away, and kept them beside her bed.

  When the guests came out of the wedding, Scott’s parents handed each of them an envelope. My brother Mike, who was standing next to the bride, immediately started squeezing. Jodi gave him a look.

  “What?” Mike said. “Is it alive?”

  “Well, it was.”

  I read the legend of the butterflies, which have no voices. When released, they rise to heaven and whisper our wishes to God.

  When the guests opened their envelopes, butterflies of all sizes and colors flew up into a beautiful clear blue sky, a whisper away from God. Most of them disappeared on the wind. Three settled back down on Jodi’s dress. One stayed on her bridal bouquet for more than an hour.

  After wedding photos, the guests piled into a bus. While my friends cleaned up, the rest of us rode to West Okoboji for a lake tour on the Queen II, the area’s famous sightseeing boat. Afterward Jodi and Scott decided to ride the Arnold Park Ferris wheel, the same one that had glistened in the night when Mom and Dad were falling in love to the sound of Tommy Dorsey at the Roof Garden so many decades before. As the rest of us watched, the Ferris wheel took Jodi and Scott, along with the ring bearer and the flower girl, up, up, up into that clear blue sky, like butterflies slipping out of their envelopes and taking flight.

  The letter Jodi sent after the honeymoon said it all: “Thank you, Mom. It was the perfect wedding.” No eight words could ever make me happier.

  If only life were that easy. If only Dewey, Jodi, and the whole Jipson family could be frozen right there, in the summer of 2003. But even as that Ferris wheel rose, even as Dewey became a star in Japan, there was a stain on the picture. Only a few months before, Mom had been diagnosed with leukemia, the latest in a long line of illnesses to try to strike her down. They say cancer, like luck, runs in a family. Unfortunately, cancer runs deep in the Jipson line.

  Chapter 23

  Memories of Mom

  My brother Steven was diagnosed with stage four non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, the most advanced form of a lethal cancer, in 1976. The doctors gave him two months to live. He was nineteen years old.

  Steven dealt with his cancer with more dignity than anybody I have ever known. He battled it, but not desperately. He lived his life, too. He never lost his sense of self. But the cancer was in his chest, and they couldn’t beat it. They knocked it down, but it came back. The treatment was painful, and it ate through Steven’s kidneys. My brother Mike, Steven’s best friend, offered to give him one of his kidneys, but Steven told him, “Don’t bother. I’ll just ruin that one, too.”

  As I struggled with a divorce, welfare, and college, Steven struggled with cancer. By 1979, he had lived longer than anyone in Iowa had ever lived with stage four non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The doctors had given him so much chemotherapy, he had no blood left in his extremities. There was no hope left in chemo, so Steven enrolled in an experimental treatment center in Houston. He was scheduled to start in January, and before the trip he wanted a full-scale, no-holds-barred Jipson Christmas. Steven wanted the clam chowder Dad always made on Christmas Eve. He wanted me to make his favorite caramel popcorn. He sat under a blanket and smiled along as we played our homemade instruments in the Jipson Family Band. It was eighteen below zero on Christmas Eve; Steven couldn’t even stand, he was so weak, but he insisted we all go to Midnight Mass. On his last night at Mom and Dad’s house, he made me drive him to Aunt Marlene’s house at two in the morning to say good-bye. Afterward, he wanted me to stay up with him and watch Brian’s Song, a movie about a football player with cancer.

  “No thanks, Stevie. I’ve already seen it.”

  But he insisted, so I stayed up with him. He fell asleep in the first five minutes.

  A week later, on January 6, Steven woke his wife at 5:00 a.m. and asked her to help him down the stairs to the sofa. When she came back down a few hours later, she couldn’t wake him. We found out later he hadn’t been enrolled in an experimental treatment program in Houston. The day before Thanksgiving, the doctors had told him there were no more treatment options left. He hadn’t told anyone because he wanted one last Jipson family Christmas, free from crying and pity, before he died.

  My parents took Steven’s death hard. Death can drive two people apart, but it drove Mom and Dad together. They cried together. They talked together. They leaned on each other. My father converted to Catholicism, Mom’s religion, and started attending church regularly for the first time in his adult life.

  And they adopted a cat.

  Three weeks after Steven’s death, Dad bought Mom a blue Persian and named him Max. Those were terrible days for them, just terrible, but Max was a sainted cat, full of personality but not wild. He would sleep in the bathroom sink; with the exception of snuggling up against Mom’s side, that sink was his favorite place in the house. If ever a cat changed a couple, it was Max. He raised my parents’ spirits. He made them laugh. He kept them company in their empty home. The children loved Max for his personality, but we loved him more for taking care of Mom and Dad.

  My older brother David, my dear friend and inspiration, was also deeply affected by Steven’s death. David had dropped out of college six weeks before graduation and after a few false starts ended up in Mason City, Iowa, about a hundred miles east of Spencer. When I think of David, though, I think of Mankato, Minnesota. The two of us were so close in Mankato. We had a wonderful time together, simply wonderful. But one night, shortly before he dropped out of college and moved away, he knocked on my door at one in the morning. It was ten below zero, and he had walked ten miles.

  He said, “There’s something wrong with me, Vicki. In my head. I think I’m having a breakdown. But you can’t tell Mom and Dad. Promise me you’ll never tell Mom and Dad.”

  I was nineteen years old, young and stupid. I promised. I never told anyone about that night, but I know now that mental illness often strikes young men, especially bright and talented young men in their early twenties like David. I know David was ill. He was as ill as Steven had been, but it wasn’t as obvious. Slowly, his condition pulled his life downward. Within a few years, he was a different person. He couldn’t hold a job. He couldn’t laugh, even with me. He started taking drugs, downers mostly, to combat depression. He fathered a child out of wedlock. He called me every few months, and we talked for hours, but over the years I heard from him less and less.

  When Steven died in January 1980, David coped with drugs. He said he couldn’t function without them. His daughter, Mackenzie, was four, and her mother cut David off from contact with her until he kicked his habit. Eight months after Steven died, David phoned me in the middle of the night to tell me he had lost his daughter.

  “You haven’t lost Mackenzie,” I told him. “If you’re straight, you can visit her. If you’re high, you can’t. It’s that simple.”

  He couldn’t see it. We talked about a million things that night, but nothing I suggested was possible. He had a blank wall in front of him. He couldn’t see any future at all. I was scared to death, but he swore he wouldn’t do anything until we talked again. He loved his daughter, he assured me, and he would never leave her. But sometime later that night or early the next morning, my brother David, my childhood buddy, picked up a shotgun and pulled the trigger.

  My friend Trudy drove me to Hartley at two in the morning. I could barely breathe; there was no way I could drive. My parents were no better. None of us wanted to face David’s death, especially so soon after Steven’s, but it was there whether we wanted it or not. A few days after the funeral, David’s landlord started calling my parents’ house and pestering them. He was screaming at us to come get David’s things, to clean out the apartment, so he could rent it again. It was another reminder that David didn’t live in the best area or associate with the kindest people.

  We drove to Mason City in two vehicles. Dad, my brothers Mike and Doug, and two of David’s old friends drove ahead in the car. My mother, Val, and I follow
ed in a truck. When we arrived, the men were standing at the curb.

  “You’re not going in there,” Dad said. “Wait here. We’ll bring everything out.”

  We didn’t know it until Dad opened the door, but nobody had touched the apartment since David’s death. The mess from what David had done, it was everywhere. Dad, Mike, and Doug had to wipe everything down before bringing it out to pack in the truck. I can still see the stains. David’s possessions were meager, to say the least, but it took all day to move them. Dad, Mike, and Doug didn’t say a word, and they’ve never spoken about that day since. When I told him I was writing this book, Dad asked me not to mention David. It wasn’t shame or secrecy. There were tears in his eyes. Even after all this time, it’s too painful for him to talk about. But talk we must.

  Two weeks after David’s death, it was time to have Max fixed. The vet gave him the anesthetic and left for ten minutes to give it time to work. Unfortunately he didn’t remove the water dish from his cage. The dish held only half an inch of water, but Max fell in and drowned.

  I happened to be there when the veterinarian came to the house. He knew my family. He knew what my parents were going through. Now he had to tell them he had killed their cat. We all stared at him for half a minute, speechless. “I loved that cat with a passion,” Dad finally said, calmly but firmly. “You son of a bitch.” Then he turned and walked upstairs. He couldn’t even speak to the guy. He couldn’t look at him. Dad still feels bad about his outburst, but Max’s death was too much. It was simply too much.

  When Mom was diagnosed with leukemia in the spring of 2003, she and Dad adopted a kitten. Mom hadn’t owned a Persian in twenty years, since the death of Max. But instead of adopting a Persian as they intended, they came back with a Himalayan, a cross between a Persian and a Siamese. He was a gray beauty with silky blue eyes, the spitting image of Max right down to the outgoing and loving personality. They named him Max II.