The Cat Family Begins To Grow

To this day I'm not really quite sure whom my mother really got our first cat for, me or herself. She grew up with pets all her life, and even when she married my father was around pets, as my father's father (my grandfather) breed hunting dogs. So she was used to having pets around her all the time. Before she got married there was Gypsy...a beautiful Beagle. The picture below shows a family photo of my great-grandfather, great-grandmother, and my younger, before married mother holding Gypsy in her lap



She probably no doubt claimed, since I was an only child, never to have brothers or sisters that she thought a pet would be ideal for me, thus the arrival of Babette, and the reason the idea of a cat, rather than a dog, was that technically speaking pets weren't allowed in our building, and she figured since cats were quiet, and one didn't have to walk them, no one would know about having a pet.

From 1962 until 1968, Babette remained my only cat. Then one day, on May 19, 1968, which was my grandmother's birthday, the two of us were on our way home from visiting at my great-grandmother's home. We were walking by an old mom & pop owned TV repair store, and the store owner who knew us, said, "Oh, look how that cat is following you. Sure enough we turned around and this tabby colored cat had been following us along. Uh, needless to say, I asked my grandmother if we could take him home, and she said yes, thus we now would have two cats. It was during these early years, that whenever we went away on vacation, we, that is my grandmother, mother and I, would take the two cats with us. For years and years, my mother's favorite place to go, kind of ad naseum, was the Lancaster, PA area, and would either stay at the Colonial Inn (which no longer exists) or the Howard Johnsons which amazingly from a search I did, does still exist. Memories came flooding back of that old Howard Johnsons we went to as I happen to find, probably my one and only existing photo of Friskey


Our cat population would grow once again a few months later, during the month of January of the following year. My grandmother was on her way out the apartment to throw trash out into the incinerator, when prancing up as grand as could be was a black and white cat who had a ribbon around her neck. She must have been someone's Christmas present, but not anyone in the building, as no other tenants had cats. She quite majestically followed my grandmother into our apartment, and on January 14, 1969, Biddy was to become our third cat. This is a picture of her when she was quite a bit older, and I purposely had tied a ribbon around her neck, reminiscent of the day she arrived into our apartment.


To be perfectly honest, if we had judged the personality of a cat by using Babette as a model, we might not ever had gotten another cat. Not that Babette was "bad" but just wasn't much of an affectionate feline. This opinion changed however, with both the arrival of Friskey and Biddy, the two most loving and affectionate kitties going. Friskey would turn out to be a rather large cat, yet with the heart of a teddy bear, while Biddy was almost comical in that she considered herself the "grand~dame" of the dwelling, milking attention whenever she could get it.