1960: Brother-Cat Tigie

By Corinne H. Smith

1960:  I turned three years old.  Daddy was 31, and he worked as a research chemist at Armstrong Cork Company in Lancaster, Penna.  Mom was a stay-at-home Mom.  We lived on Hathaway Street in West Hempfield Township.  The #1 song on the radio on my third birthday was “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” by Elvis Presley.  Mom snapped this photograph.

     This year we added a new member to our family.  Enter a gray and black striped tabby kitten named Tigie.  His official name was TIE-gee, pronounced with a hard G.  Quickly we shortened it to one syllable, Tige, still with a long I and a hard G.  Whenever my Grandma Banzhoff visited, she called him “Tidee.”  But this was usually because she didn’t have her teeth in at the time.  And she was also hard of hearing.  Tigie’s birthday was May 7th.

     Mom had been a dog person. She grew up with a pooch named Teddy who wore a homemade hat that always had “one more star on it than Eisenhower had.”  Her brothers would salute him whenever they came home from the war.

     Daddy had grown up with barn cats and house cats.  Old albums contain many photos of him and his siblings in their yard, with at least one cat nearby.  He remembers the night when a mother cat named Susan climbed the pear tree at the side of the house.  As she stepped through the open window of the second-floor bedroom he shared with his brother Richard, the boys saw that she was carrying one of her kittens in her mouth.  My father still marvels at this feline feat.

     Tige was a wonderful cat.  I considered him my brother, since I was otherwise an only child.  He lived for a spectacular 22 years and set a high standard for all of our subsequent cats.  His long life is even more amazing, given the fact that he was an indoor-outdoor cat and was prone to all of the potential dangers lurking outside of our two houses.  He probably wouldn’t be so lucky today if we lived in those same, but now busier, neighborhoods.

Tige and me, trying out the sofa bed for visitors

     In our first house, Daddy built a set of in-and-out doors for Tige.  They were craftily tucked inside one of the window wells of our basement.  The little doors made distinctive sounds when they slapped shut.  As soon as we heard one, we’d say “Oh, Tige’s home.”  He’d immediately bound up the basement steps and bounce into the kitchen to eat.  When he’d come into the living room to greet us, we’d pick him up and put our noses into his fur.  He smelled like the cool, fresh outdoors.

     I often wondered what kind of adventures Tige had, whenever he wasn’t at home with us.  What fields he scrutinized, and what yards and roads he crossed!  He may have merely found a nice place or two to snooze in.  One of his favorites was underneath the Japanese maple bush in our first backyard.  I crawled under there one day to see what it was like.  For a small animal, it was a perfect hideaway.

     Having free reign to come and go was convenient for him.  It was not so perfect for us.  One day Mom was surprised to find “Puss Lantz” eating at Tige’s dish in the kitchen.  Tige had taught a neighbor kitty how to use his doors.

     Tige was also an active predator.  At times he would bring home live prey:  birds, mice, rabbits, and at least once, a rat.  Neighbors could tell if Tige brought us a bird whenever they noticed that all of our windows and doors were thrown wide open. 

     Mice, he would dispatch with regularity at the bottom of the stairs you see in our birthday photos.  In the middle of the night, he would call “Mum-wow” from the bottom of those steps.  Mom would get up and shout down to him that he was a good boy for bringing her such a treasure.  Then he would corner the mouse and play with it until he killed it.  He’d eat it in front of the television set.  In the morning, when I’d come down to watch cartoons, there would often be a small stack of vital mouse organs left in front of the set.  Daddy claims that Tige would have left the gall bladder, since it would have been full of bile and have a bitter taste.  But I’ve since known cats who ate the whole mouse.  I think Tige was finicky.

     One day when I was young, I thought Tige’s whiskers needed a trim.  I took a pair of scissors and cut one set down to about an inch long.  But only on one side of his face.  Then I held him up to the big mirror in my parents’ bedroom so that he could admire himself.  He didn’t seem to be impressed.  My mother was, however, whenever the cat trotted downstairs and she got a good look at him.  I suppose I was somehow reprimanded for this infraction.

     Most mornings, Daddy would be sure to pat Tige on the head as he made his way out the door and off to work.  Tige’s head would smell like Daddy’s aftershave for the rest of the day.  I think of Tige whenever I get a whiff of the cologne that Daddy still wears.

     Tige loved to be held, and he was a lap cat.  I taught him to embrace me.  I would lean down in front of him, and he would put his front paws on my left shoulder.  I’d grab the rest of him and stand up, and he was instantly cuddled in my chest.  And he’d purr.  He’d also “drizzle” whenever he was really happy.  He’d close his eyes, purr, and a drop of spit would build up and eventually drip from his mouth.  We thought this was endearing and a sign of pure contentment.

     After the movies Winnie-the-Pooh and the Blustery Day and Winnie-the-Pooh and Tigger Too came out (in 1968 and 1974 respectively), we figured that Tige deserved the nickname Tigger.  We then used it interchangeably with Tige and Tigie.

     Daddy likes to ask questions that don’t always require answers.  There were times when he’d look at the dishes on the dinner table in awe and say, “Where’d you get the radishes?” or “Where’d the onions come from?”  Mom eventually got tired of these queries.  One day in exasperation, she quipped, “Tige found them and brought them home.”  From then on, Tige evidently foraged quite a bit on our behalf.  How and why he would bring fresh veggies back from his far-flung adventures, we never considered.

     One night Tige tangled with a nasty animal.  It may have been a rat or a raccoon.  Tige limped home with a torn-up tummy, a ripped ear, and a swollen and infected rear foot.  A veterinarian sewed him up and removed one toe.  After a recuperation period, Tige was good to go, for many years afterward.  One cat life down, eight more yet to live.

     He must have been a ferocious fighter.  Our second house didn’t have cat doors, and Tige had to stay inside overnight.  Whenever cats came around to our sliding glass door in the middle of the evening, Tige would moan and scream and throw himself against the glass.  One of us would get up, turn on the outside light, and say, “Oh, look at the pretty kitty, Tige.  Isn’t he nice?”  And the other cat would run off.  Tige would be left to spit and sputter, probably saying all sorts of disparaging things about us to himself, because we wouldn’t let him out to suitably defend our property.  But he had defended us.  And we got a glimpse of how close we lived to the wildness in an otherwise tame animal.

     We were truly fortunate to be able to share our lives with Tige.  His kitty successors have been Josephine and Samantha for my parents; and Barney, L.E., Sparky, and Squeaks for me.  Our current kitty companion, Maizie Dae Nosentail, looks a lot like Tige, since she too is a tabby tiger.  She has some legendary paw prints to follow.  We’ll have to tell her the remarkable stories of Tige.