(illustration credit 8.3)
“Okay, here’s the deal—I’ll stop chasing you if you agree to become a dog.”
I remarked that his efforts on behalf of the Society must keep him very busy. He nodded glumly. “Yes,” he said. “And sometimes financially embarrassed, too. The Society’s annual intake, you know, seldom amounts to more than three thousand dollars. This means I’m often strapped to keep it going.” Then his expression grew strained, as if he were returning to some ancient inner debate. “My advertising clients think I’m peculiar to spend so much time on cats,” he said. “They even go so far as to tell me so. They don’t seem to understand that I’m not in this for money. When you think of all the homeless cats in the world, you realize that somebody must take care of them. What’s peculiar about that? Do you think it’s peculiar?”
I said I didn’t think it peculiar for anyone to do what seemed right to him. “Exactly!” Mr. Kendell said, more brightly. “My first wife, who started the Society in 1938, was in all respects the same as I am. She was the sort of woman who would get up at four in the morning to rescue a cat marooned in a tree.” His present wife, he went on, whom he married, as a widower, in 1947, is also in complete accord with his views on cats. Fortunately, being a wage earner, she is able to help the Society along with her salary. “Perhaps I’ve always felt so strongly about cats because I’ve been childless,” Mr. Kendell said. “But whatever the reason, this resistance to the Society gets me down. However, enough!” he added, disciplining himself with a smile. “Every organization struggles at first. Someday we’ll get going in a big way, and when we do, watch us travel! Our initial moves are all planned out. Here in Manhattan, for instance, we’ll have a National Headquarters Building, with a Trophy Hall, to house the statuary, mementos, and portraits that our members keep willing us of their pets. Then, every big city in the country will have a model twenty-thousand-dollar cat shelter, like that one.” He called my attention to a framed drawing on one of the bulletin boards, which he said he’d had an architect turn out for him. Its floor plan included kitchens, dormitories, and an observation room for cats, and quarters for resident attendants. “Eventually,” he said, “this country will have a national law, like Hong Kong’s, requiring every home to have a cat.”
“Is there actually such a law in Hong Kong?” I asked.
“Of course!” Mr. Kendell said. He went over to a cardboard container that served as a filing cabinet and extracted from it a cablegram the Governor of Hong Kong had sent him—in response to one of his own—confirming the law’s existence. After replacing the communication, he walked over to the basin and washed his hands. As he was drying them, he looked at me thoughtfully. “How many cats do you have?” he asked.
“None,” I answered in considerable embarrassment.
Mr. Kendell’s face froze. “Young lady!” he said, aghast. “Do you realize you’re depriving yourself of one of life’s most glorious experiences? Here! Look at this letter that came in today from a new member.” Discarding his towel, he picked up a sheet of paper from his desk, with a Park Avenue address engraved at its head, and handed it to me. “The enclosed check is from my two neutered males, Francis and Marcel, aged eight and twelve years old, respectively,” the letter read. “They have let me live with them all their lives, and have taught me what a cat needs and gives in politeness, grace, faithfulness, cleanliness, intelligence, and affection. No matter what some biassed humans may say, I know that cats are the most loyal friends we have. I pray for the time people will recognize this and the world will become a true cat-and-man Utopia!”
I put the letter down. “I have two small children,” I said defensively. “I’m afraid a cat might scratch them.”
CAT IN THE CAGE
Hold tight to your chairs, folks, for this is a nature story about a remarkable cat. You may have trouble believing it but it’s true, as you can find out by dropping around to 40 East Forty-ninth Street, where the Penthouse Galleries are. The cat belongs to the building, in a manner of speaking, and is fed twice a day in the superintendent’s apartment, which is on the twentieth floor. Well, twice a day, at meal times, the cat strolls through the lobby of the building, enters an elevator cage, and rides up to the twentieth floor, where she disembarks and has her dinner. Remarkable? People get on and off at other floors, on the way up. The cat never does, not even if you miaow to her and try to tempt her. The elevator-boys do nothing to guide her; she just sits in the cage watching, and presumably counting, or else reading the numbers of the floors.
| 1931 |
“Good heavens, young lady!” said Mr. Kendell, throwing up his hands. “Sometimes I feel like giving up. Here I am, working day and night, broadcasting factual information about cats, and you make a statement like that.” With a reproachful look, he leaned toward me. “Pardon me,” he said in a silky voice. He put his hand across the desk, the fingers talonlike on my arm. Speaking slowly, as one does to impress a child, he said, “I—will—explain. Cats—don’t—scratch—people. People—scratch—cats. Cats like to open and close their paws against a person’s skin—thus.” He kneaded my flesh with his fingertips. “Now, if, at a time like this, an ignorant person makes a sudden movement, naturally the cat’s claws sink into the epidermis. That’s not the cat’s fault. It’s the person who’s to blame, for not being better coordinated with his pet. Your ignorance of this principle causes me real concern.” Mr. Kendell looked at me steadily, making sure I understood.
I said that perhaps I had been wrong in my fears, and hastily asked Mr. Kendell to tell me about his service operations. At once, his face reassumed its customary gentle expression. “Our service operations vary greatly, but they are all free of charge,” he said. “We maintain an adoption service, for instance, with normally a list of about four hundred cats on file waiting for new homes. As a rule, we don’t take physical possession of a cat except in an emergency—just get the right parties together by phone. To new owners using our adoption service, we issue pamphlets called ‘How to Receive Your Cat’ and ‘Cat Facts,’ both of which I wrote.” He handed me two leaflets, and I noted that one of them listed as necessities for the new arrival a “comfortable bed complete with kapok pillow and tiny blanket; special feeding and drinking vessels; collar, harness, and leash; metal toilet pan; scratching post and catnip-impregnated toys.”
Mr. Kendell turned to a batch of filing cards on which he had kept a record of service operations completed the preceding month, and read me a few of them. One case involved arranging for a mate for a cat in Pocatello, Idaho; in another, a lady in New Jersey who accepts up to thirty cats for boarding in her home had been prevailed upon to look after the pet of a visiting Englishwoman until she got settled in the city. Mr. Kendell dwelt at length upon a third case—“an especially pitiful one,” he called it. A cat had deserted its master in an apartment house on East Fifty-seventh Street and had gone to the basement to live with the janitor, from whom it refused to be enticed even by breast of chicken, its favorite tidbit. When the grieving owner consulted the Society, Mr. Kendell suggested that the man acquire another cat, explaining to him that he must have in some way bored or disgusted the original cat. The man reluctantly agreed to this solution. “I never saw a poor fellow so broken up, but I felt the kindest thing was to tell him the truth,” Mr. Kendell said to me. “Doubtless his own personality was at fault. It may have been just a simple case of trying too hard. But, whatever it was, I knew the cat’s decision was irrevocable. As I told this man, a horse will forget its feeling toward a particular person in six months, but a cat—never.” Mr. Kendell illustrated this faculty of memory in cats by reminiscing about one that he and his first wife had owned. It had shown its fondness for a certain male friend of theirs by pouncing on his hat whenever he visited their home. After an absence of several years, the friend made a surprise call on them, during the war. He was in uniform and forty pounds heavier, and at first the Kendells didn’t recognize him. “But the cat at once leaped for th
e cap in his hand,” Mr. Kendell said, with a triumphant smile.
There was silence in the stuffy little room. A gust of wind shook the panes.
“Also,” said Mr. Kendell presently, “cats can talk.”
“What?” I said.
“Of course!” he went on. “One of the commonest fallacies is that they can’t. Actually, the average cat has a vocabulary of from fifty to sixty definitely distinguishable words. The words are formed by nuances of sound from the cat’s highly developed vocal cords, accompanied by the proper facial expression. When my two cats, for example, want an egg, they gallop for the icebox, all the time making the sound that means ‘eggs.’ It goes like this.” Mr. Kendell opened his mouth wide and emitted a rolling “Me-ow!,” assuming, as he did so, what I took to be the proper facial expression for “eggs”—one of wide-eyed gravity. “Naturally,” he continued, “the ‘egg’ sound is totally different from the word for ‘milk,’ which goes like this.” Mr. Kendell narrowed his eyes and opened his mouth again, and this time a sharp, plaintive “Meow!” emerged. “Needless to say, there are sounds for all the other common ideas or objects, such as ‘outside,’ ‘please,’ ‘thank you,’ ‘fish,’ ‘liver,’ and so on,” he said. “Any owner correctly attuned to his cat understands these. Conversely, cats can understand human speech. Let an owner say to his wife ‘Why don’t you open the window for Puss?’ and the cat’s there in a bound. What’s more, cats can read printed labels on cans, or at least labels that concern them. For instance, they show not the slightest interest in a tin of kitchen cleanser the exact size of a tin of salmon, but let the tin of salmon appear and they set up their request murmur—a deep-throated purr accompanied by upward glances.” Mr. Kendell glanced upward and purred. It was a resonant, authentic sound. I had the impression that if I were to close my eyes, I would feel myself in the room with a cat possessed of vocal cords of extraordinary power and timbre.
At that moment, the door opened and a postman crowded into the office. He seemed impressed to find Mr. Kendell purring. “Here’s another one of them sacks—and some more cat mail,” he said, dropping on Mr. Kendell’s desk a large, pungent-smelling cloth bag, whose odor came pleasantly to me through the still air, and three envelopes addressed to the Society. Then, after looking at Mr. Kendell interestedly over his shoulder, the postman left.
Mr. Kendell stopped purring and swiftly reached for the three envelopes. He examined their postmarks eagerly, turned them over to scrutinize the return addresses, and shook them. “No coins,” he said tersely. It suddenly seemed very important to him—as it seemed to me, just then—that the American Feline Society get some contributions. He tore open the envelopes. The first two contained no money, and he slapped them angrily on the desk. “Terrible! Terrible!” he burst out. His face had the hurt look that can come into a thwarted child’s. The third envelope contained a check. “Ha!” said Mr. Kendell. “Ha!” His countenance suddenly brightened, like an autumn field unexpectedly swept by sunshine. He smiled. “Of course, support means more than just mere money,” he said to me. “Much more. Now pardon me while I write out an acknowledgment for this before I forget it.” He slipped some forms and carbon paper into his typewriter and batted out a message, saying, as he did so, “It’s wonderful, wonderful, to know you’re not alone in the fight.”
(illustration credit 8.5)
When Mr. Kendell had finished, he laid the papers to one side and, still smiling, picked up the sack. “Catnip from one of our members, for free distribution by the Society,” he said. “The highest quality, fresh from the Pennsylvania mountains. Not a stem in the batch.” He swung the sack up alongside some others on top of a pile of cartons, and in doing so tumbled a white wooden tray to the floor. Before replacing it, he showed it to me, saying, “One of the custom-made Cat-a-terias the Society will order for members. Just sent a minister in Iowa six the other day. Very attractive little things.” The Cat-a-teria, which was supported on legs, contained two feeding dishes and was decorated with gaily colored figures of sardines and mice. There was also a space in which to inscribe a pet’s monogram. “You never can do too much for your short-hairs,” Mr. Kendell said gently.
Back at his desk, Mr. Kendell produced two large scrapbooks filled with some of his press releases and the publicity they have inspired. “Since our most vital work is public education, you’ll want to look at these,” he said. As I turned the pages, I was amazed at the number of publications, including big metropolitan dailies, that have carried cat stories obviously prompted by Mr. Kendell’s releases, which he had pasted beside the clippings. The scrapbooks also held numerous newspaper photographs, cartoons, letters to the editor, and editorials based on Kendell releases, as well as quantities of columns by such syndicated writers as Paul Gallico, Bugs Baer, Bob Hope, George Sokolsky, Frederick Othman, and Robert Ruark.
“Can I borrow those kittens for an hour? I want to freak out the people who had me spayed.”
Much, but by no means all, of the material in the books was concerned with the annual observance of National Cat Week, late in the fall. This event was inaugurated by the Society in 1946, and for its promotion, Mr. Kendell told me, he goes into what is, even for him, extraordinarily high gear. “For several weeks before the event, I put in eighteen hours a day, seven days a week—a taxing schedule,” he said. “But when I think of the number of needy cats, I easily find the strength to go on.” His National Cat Week program involves not only stepping up his writing and mailing out of releases but calling on the publicity representatives of recording and broadcasting companies and making personal appearances for the cause, as he did on one occasion on a C.B.S. radio program entitled “Pets.” He tries to enlist the aid of recording-company publicity men in choosing an official song for the occasion (in 1949, the last time he was successful, it was “The Pussycat Song”), and urges broadcasting stations to have their disc jockeys feature the tune, with appropriate remarks. Crowning his efforts during this hectic season, Mr. Kendell adds to his long regular mailing list a rotating selection of Hollywood press agents who, he has discovered, can be induced to prepare photographs of some of their more photogenic female clients in the act of cuddling cats. “Hollywood has a genuine cat appreciation, for which we are very grateful,” he told me. Each year, a dozen or so actresses are so photographed, and their press agents supply gratis hundreds of glossy prints for captioning by Mr. Kendell, who then sends them to newspapers, many of which give them an encouragingly enthusiastic reception. In the past, Greer Garson, Ann Jeffreys, Janet Blair, Dale Evans, Barbara Bates, and Elizabeth Taylor have been among those tapped. As a windup to Hollywood’s participation, Mr. Kendell names as chairman of National Cat Week an actress playing in a current film whose cast includes a cat, and the cat is named honorary chairman—to the clicking of more cameras.
Each year, as a matter of course, Mr. Kendell petitions President Truman for government recognition of National Cat Week. But things are not as they should be between the two leaders. There has been a coolness, Mr. Kendell said, dating from Mr. Truman’s first term, when the President, at a National Press Club dinner, referred slightingly to cats and added, with definite jocularity, that there were even some people urging him to proclaim a National Cat Week. As Mr. Kendell told me this, his gentlemanly voice grew sharp. “Naturally the papers called me about it, and naturally I wrote the President at once, suggesting he withdraw his remark,” he said. “Naturally he did so, at his next press conference, explaining he had been critical of two-legged, not four-legged, cats—still not the observation of a man who thinks intelligently about cats, but one that I decided it would be useless to protest.”
Returning to the scrapbooks, Mr. Kendell pointed to evidence of some other achievements of his that struck me as arresting. During the war, for instance, he launched a Ration Point Pool for Cats. As a result of the publicity given the pool, vegetarians and theosophists all over the country sent their unused red, or meat, ration stamps to the Society in such numbers that
they lay around the office in large paper bags, awaiting calls from the owners of protein-starved cats. Again, shortly after the war, Mr. Kendell checked a threat to the cats of New Jersey in the person of a Canadian fur buyer. This man, who claimed to have found a way of processing cat fur into “Prairie Sable,” was canvassing the schools of Jersey, offering a fur coat free to any teacher who sent him a specified number of cat skins collected by her pupils. “Imagine—trapping cats!” said Mr. Kendell. By the time Mr. Kendell got through assailing the plan—getting in touch with Jersey educators directly and with Jersey clergymen through the press and radio—the fur buyer was in full flight; when last heard from, he had retreated to his own country, where he was engaged in a similar project involving Canadian rats.
Despite the value of such campaigns, they benefit, after all, only cats in this country, and Mr. Kendell told me that he is happiest when he is assisting cats on a global scale. “Fortunately, these opportunities come to me often. For example,” he said, pointing out a clipping in one of the scrapbooks, “that story was the result of a telephone call to me a couple of years ago from an English newspaper’s American representative here in New York. He informed me that several eastern counties in England were undergoing the severest sort of cat-influenza epidemic, and asked if I could help. Could I! I phoned a Missouri veterinarian whom I had seen cure several cats of influenza by a serum and told him the situation. He gave me the phone numbers of the Indiana wholesaler of the serum and of its Kansas manufacturer, and within a matter of minutes I had spoken to both of them. Oh, the Society works quickly, I can tell you! A few hours later, five hundred cubic centimeters of the medicine had arrived here by plane, under refrigeration. It was immediately flown on to London and rushed from the airport there, under motorcycle escort, to the British Ministry of Agriculture. Soon after, the influenza epidemic subsided.”
The Big New Yorker Book of Cats Page 15
