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

  By now it had been twenty minutes since I pulled the kitten out of the drop box, and I’d had plenty of time to think through a few things—the once common practice of keeping library cats, my ongoing plan to make the library more friendly and appealing, the logistics of bowls and food and cat litter, the trusting expression on the kitten’s face when he burrowed into my chest and looked up into my eyes. So I was more than prepared when someone finally asked, “What should we do with him?”

  “Well,” I said, as if the thought had just occurred to me, “maybe we can keep him.”

  Chapter 2

  A Perfect Addition

  The most amazing thing about the kitten was how happy he was that first day. Here he was in a new environment, surrounded by eager strangers who wanted nothing more than to squeeze him, fondle him, and coo over him, and he was perfectly calm. No matter how many times we passed him from hand to hand, and no matter what position we held him in, he was never jumpy or fidgety. He never tried to bite or get away. Instead, he just melted into each person’s arms and stared up into her eyes.

  And that was no small feat, because we didn’t leave him alone for a second. If someone had to set him down—for instance, because there was actual work to do—there were always at least five sets of hands ready to grab him, hold him, and love him. In fact, when I set him down at closing time that first night, I had to watch him for five minutes to make sure he could totter all the way to his food dish and litter box. I don’t think his poor frostbitten feet had touched the ground all day.

  The next morning, Doris Armstrong brought in a warm pink blanket. Doris was the grandparent on staff, our mother hen. We all watched as she bent down and scratched the kitten under the chin, then folded the blanket and put it in a cardboard box. The kitten stepped gingerly into the box and curled his legs underneath his body for warmth. His eyes closed in blissful contentment, but he had only a few seconds to rest before someone snatched him up and wrapped him in her arms. A few seconds, but it was enough. The staff had been polarized for years. Now we were all making accommodations, coming together as a family, and the kitten was clearly happy to call the library home.

  It wasn’t until late the second morning that we finally shared our little guy with someone outside the staff. That person was Mary Houston, Spencer’s local historian and a member of the library board. The staff may already have accepted the kitten, but keeping him wasn’t our decision. The previous day I had called the mayor, Squeege Chapman, who was in his last month in office. As I suspected, he didn’t care. Squeege wasn’t a reader; I’m not even sure he knew Spencer had a library. The city attorney, my second call, didn’t know of any statutes barring animals from the library and didn’t feel compelled to spend time looking for one. Good enough for me. The library board, a panel of citizens appointed by the mayor to oversee the library, had the final say. They didn’t object to the idea of a library cat, but I can’t say they were enthusiastic. Their response was more “Let’s give it a try” than “Heck, yeah, we’re behind you a hundred percent.”

  That’s why meeting a board member like Mary was so important. Agreeing to have an animal in the library was one thing; agreeing on this animal was another thing entirely. You can’t just put any cute cat in a library. If he’s not friendly, he’s going to make enemies. If he’s too shy or scared, nobody will stand up for him. If he’s not patient, he’s going to bite. If he’s too rambunctious, he’s going to make a mess. And above all, he has to love being around people, and he has to make those people love him back. In short, it has to be the right cat.

  I had no doubt about our boy. From the moment he looked up into my eyes that first morning, so calm and content, I knew he was right for the library. There wasn’t a flutter in his heart as I held him in my arms; there wasn’t a moment of panic in his eyes. He trusted me completely. He trusted everyone on staff completely. That’s what made him so special: his complete and unabashed trust. And because of it, I trusted him, too.

  But that doesn’t mean I wasn’t a little apprehensive when I motioned Mary into the staff area. As I took the kitten in my arms and turned to face her, I felt a flutter in my heart, a moment of doubt. When the kitten had looked into my eyes, something else had happened, too; we had made a connection. He was more than just a cat to me. It had only been a day, but already I couldn’t stand the thought of being without him.

  “There he is,” Mary exclaimed with a smile. I held him a little more tightly as she reached out to pet him on the top of the head, but Dewey didn’t even stiffen. Instead, he stretched out his neck to sniff her hand.

  “Oh, my,” Mary said. “He’s handsome.”

  Handsome. I heard it over and over again the next few days because there was no other way to describe him. This was a handsome cat. His coat was a mix of vibrant orange and white with subtle darker stripes. It grew longer as he got older, but as a kitten it was thick and stylishly long only around his neck. A lot of cats have pointy noses, or their mouths jut out a bit too far, or they’re a little lopsided, but this kitten’s face was perfectly proportioned. And his eyes, those huge golden eyes.

  But it wasn’t just his looks that made him beautiful; it was also his personality. If you cared at all about cats, you just had to hold him. There was something in his face, in the way he looked at you, that called out for love.

  “He likes to be cradled,” I said, gently sliding him into Mary’s arms. “No, on his back. That’s right. Like a baby.”

  “A one-pound baby.”

  “I don’t think he even weighs that much.”

  The kitten shook his tail and nestled down into Mary’s arms. He didn’t just trust the library staff instinctively, it turned out; he trusted everyone.

  “Oh, Vicki,” Mary said. “He’s adorable. What’s his name?”

  “We’re calling him Dewey. After Melville Dewey. But we haven’t really decided on a name yet.”

  “Hi, Dewey. Do you like the library?” Dewey stared into Mary’s face, then pushed his head against her arm. Mary looked up with a smile. “I could hold him all day.”

  But, of course, she didn’t. She put Dewey back into my arms, and I took him around the corner. The entire staff was waiting for us. “That went well,” I said. “One down, ten thousand to go.”

  Slowly we started introducing Dewey to a few regulars known to love cats. He was still weak, so we passed him directly into their arms. Marcie Muckey came in that second day. Instantly smitten. Mike Baehr and his wife, Peg, loved him. “This is a great idea,” they said, which was nice to hear since Mike was on the library board. Pat Jones and Judy Johnson thought him adorable. Actually there were four Judy Johnsons in Spencer. Two were regular library users, and both were Dewey fans. How big is a town of 10,000 people? Big enough to have four Judy Johnsons, three furniture stores, two commercial streets with stoplights, but only one mansion. Everyone calls it The Mansion. Typical Iowa—no fuss, no bother, just the facts.

  A week later, Dewey’s story ran on the front page of the Spencer Daily Reporter under the headline “Purr-fect Addition Made to Spencer Library.” The article, which took up half the page, told the story of Dewey’s miraculous rescue and was accompanied by a color photograph of a tiny orange kitten staring shyly but confidently into the camera from atop an old-fashioned pull-drawer card catalog.

  Publicity is a dangerous thing. For a week, Dewey had been a secret between the library staff and a few select patrons. If you didn’t come into the library, you didn’t know about him. Now everyone in town knew. Most people, even library regulars, didn’t give Dewey a second thought. There were two groups, though, that were thrilled by his arrival: the cat lovers and the children. Just the smiles on the faces of the children, their excitement and laughter, were enough to convince me Dewey should stay.

  Then there were the complainers. I was a little disappointed, I must admit, but not surprised. There is nothing on God’s green earth that someone won’t complain about, including both God and green earth.
r />   One woman took particular offense. Her letter, sent to me and every member of the city council, was pure fire and brimstone, full of images of children keeling over from sudden asthma attacks and pregnant mothers spontaneously miscarrying when exposed to kitty litter. According to the letter, I was a murderous madwoman who was not only threatening the health of every innocent child in town, born or unborn, but also destroying the social fabric of the community. An animal! In a library! If we let that stand, what was to stop people from walking a cow down Grand Avenue? In fact, she threatened to show up in the library one morning very soon with her cow in tow. Fortunately nobody took her seriously. I have no doubt she spoke for others in the community, in her overblown way, but general anger wasn’t my concern. None of those people, as far as I could tell, ever visited the library.

  Far more important to me, though, were the worried phone calls. “My child has allergies. What am I going to do? He loves the library,” one woman said. I knew that would be the most common concern, so I was prepared. A year earlier, Muffin, the beloved cat-in-residence at the Putnam Valley Library in upstate New York, had been banished after a library board member developed a severe cat allergy. As a consequence, the library lost $80,000 in promised donations, mostly from the estates of local citizens. I had no intention of letting my cat, or my library, go the way of Muffin.

  Spencer didn’t have an allergist, so I solicited the advice of two general practice doctors. The Spencer Public Library, they noted, was a large, open space sectioned off by rows of four-foot-high shelves. The staff area, my office, and the supply closets were enclosed by a temporary wall, leaving six feet open to the ceiling. There were two door-size openings in that wall, and since neither had a door, they were always accessible. Even the staff area was an open space, with desks pushed back-to-back or separated by bookshelves.

  Not only did this layout allow Dewey easy access to the safety of the staff area at all times, but the doctors assured me it would also prevent the buildup of dander and hair. The library, apparently, was perfectly designed to prevent allergies. If anyone on staff had been allergic it might have been a problem, but a few hours of exposure every couple of days? The doctors agreed there was nothing to worry about.

  I spoke personally with each concerned caller and passed on this professional assessment. The parents were skeptical, of course, but most brought their children to the library for a trial run. I held Dewey in my arms for each visit. I not only didn’t know how the parents would react, I didn’t know how Dewey would react because the children were so excited to see him. Their mothers would tell them to be quiet, be gentle. The children would approach slowly, tentatively, and whisper, “Hi, Dewey,” and then explode with squeals as their mothers ushered them away with a quick, “That’s enough.” Dewey didn’t mind the noise; he was the calmest kitten I’d ever seen. He did mind, I think, that these children weren’t allowed to pet him.

  But a few days later, one family was back, this time with a camera. And this time the allergic little boy, the object of such concern for the mother, was sitting beside Dewey, petting him, while his mother took pictures.

  “Justin can’t have pets,” she told me. “I never knew how much he missed them. He loves Dewey already.”

  I loved Dewey already, too. We all loved Dewey. How could you resist his charm? He was beautiful, loving, social—and still limping on his tiny frostbitten feet. What I couldn’t believe was how much Dewey loved us. How comfortable he seemed around strangers. His attitude seemed to be, how can anyone not love a cat? Or more simply, how can anyone resist me? Dewey didn’t think of himself, I soon realized, as just another cat. He always thought of himself, correctly, as one of a kind.

  Chapter 3

  Dewey Readmore Books

  Dewey was a fortunate cat. He not only survived the freezing library drop box, but also fell into the arms of a staff that loved him and a library perfectly designed to care for him. There were no two ways about it, Dewey led a charmed life. But Spencer was also lucky, because Dewey couldn’t have fallen into our lives at a better time. That winter wasn’t just bitterly cold; it was one of the worst times in Spencer’s history.

  Those who lived in larger cities may not remember the farm crisis of the 1980s. Maybe you remember Willie Nelson and Farm Aid. Maybe you remember reading about the collapse of family farming, about the nation moving from small growers to large factory farms that stretch for miles without a farmhouse, or even a farmworker, in sight. For most people, it was just a story, not something that affected them directly.

  In Spencer, you could feel it: in the air, in the ground, in every spoken word. We had a solid manufacturing base, but we were still a farm town. We supported, and were supported by, farmers. And on the farms, things were falling apart. These were families we knew, families that had lived in the area for generations, and we could see the strain. First they stopped coming in for new parts and machinery, making do with bootstrap repairs. Then they cut back on supplies. Finally they stopped making mortgage payments, hoping for a booming harvest to set the account books right. When a miracle didn’t come, the banks foreclosed. Almost half the farms in northwest Iowa went into foreclosure in the 1980s. Most of the new owners were giant farming conglomerates, out-of-state speculators, or insurance companies.

  The farm crisis wasn’t a natural disaster like the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. This was primarily a financial disaster. In 1978, farmland in Clay County was selling for $900 an acre. Then the price of land took off. In 1982, farmland was selling for $2,000 an acre. A year later, it was $4,000 an acre. Farmers borrowed up and bought more land. Why not, when the price was going up forever and you could make more money selling off land every few years than you could farming it?

  Then the economy took a downturn. The price of land began to drop and credit dried up. The farmers couldn’t borrow against their land to buy new machinery, or even new seed for the planting season. Crop prices weren’t high enough to pay the interest on the old loans, many of which had rates of more than 20 percent a year. It took four or five years to reach bottom, years with false bottoms and false hopes, but economic forces were pulling our farmers steadily down.

  In 1985, Land O’Lakes, the giant butter and margarine manufacturer, pulled out of the plant on the north edge of town. Soon after, unemployment reached 10 percent, which doesn’t sound too bad until you realize that the population of Spencer had fallen from 11,000 to 8,000 in just a few years. The value of houses dropped 25 percent seemingly overnight. People were leaving the county, even the state of Iowa, looking for jobs.

  The price of farmland plummeted further, forcing more farmers into foreclosure. But selling the land at auction couldn’t cover the loans; the banks were stuck with the loss. These were rural banks, the backbones of small towns. They made loans to local farmers, men and women they knew and trusted. When the farmers couldn’t pay, the system collapsed. In towns all across Iowa, banks failed. Banks were failing across the entire Midwest. The savings and loan in Spencer was sold to outsiders for pennies on the dollar, and the new owners didn’t want to make new loans. Economic development stalled. As late as 1989, there wasn’t a single housing permit issued in the city of Spencer. Not one. Nobody wanted to put money into a dying town.

  Every Christmas, Spencer had a Santa Claus. The retailers sponsored a raffle and gave away a trip to Hawaii. In 1979, there wasn’t a vacant storefront in town for Santa to set up shop in. In 1985, there were twenty-five empty storefronts downtown, a 30 percent vacancy rate. No trip to Hawaii was offered. Santa barely made it to town. There was a running joke: the last store owner out of downtown Spencer, please turn off the lights.

  The library did what it could. When Land O’Lakes skipped town, we set up a job bank that contained all our job listings and books on job skills, job descriptions, and technical training. We set up a computer so local men and women could create résumés and cover letters. This was the first computer most of these people had ever seen. It was almost depressing ho
w many people used the job bank. And if it was depressing for an employed librarian, just think how depressing it was for a laid-off factory worker, bankrupt small business owner, or out-of-work farmhand.

  Then into our laps fell Dewey. I don’t want to make too much of this one turn of events, because Dewey didn’t put food on anyone’s table. He didn’t create jobs. He didn’t turn our economy around. But one of the worst things about bad times is the effect on your mind. Bad times drain you of energy. They occupy your thoughts. They taint everything in your life. Bad news is as poisonous as bad bread. At the very least, Dewey was a distraction.

  But he was so much more. Dewey’s story resonated with the people of Spencer. We identified with it. Hadn’t we all been shoved down the library drop box by the banks? By outside economic forces? By the rest of America, which ate our food but didn’t care about the people who grew it?

  Here was an alley cat, left for dead in a freezing drop box, terrified, alone, and clinging to life. He made it through that dark night, and that terrible event turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to him. He never lost his trust, no matter what the circumstances, or his appreciation for life. He was humble. Maybe humble isn’t the right word—he was a cat, after all—but he wasn’t arrogant. He was confident. Maybe it was the confidence of the near-death survivor, the serenity you find when you’ve been to the end, beyond hope, and made it back. All I knew was that, from the moment we found him, Dewey believed everything was going to be fine.

  And when he was around, he made others believe that, too. It took him ten days to get healthy enough to explore the library on his own, and once he did it was clear he had no interest in books, shelves, and other inanimate objects. His interest was people. If there was a patron in the library, he’d walk straight up to him—still slow on his sore feet but no longer hobbling—and jump into his lap. More often than not he was pushed away, but rejection never deterred him. Dewey kept jumping, kept looking for laps to lie in and hands to pet him, and things started to change.