Blue Eyed Sweet Face Thorpe

Fall 1953 – 3117 Merle Hay Road, Des Moines, Iowa

I was looking through our old photos to find some pictures to use in this blog. Mostly I wanted to incorporate them in the header of these pages, so keep a lookout for them because they will change from time to time. But some of them were so interesting that I decided they were good topics to talk about all by themselves.

Today’s entry features one of those photographs, two in fact. In the Fall of 1953 I was five years old and just starting kindergarten. While playing in the backyard Mom called to me to show me something interesting. She had discovered that a local feral cat had had its babies in our garage. The garage was a ramshackle affair, quite dilapidated and it’s a wonder they even let me play in it at all. The actual garage was filled with old lumber and almost impassable. But the back of the garage had kind of a lean-to shed built onto it. At some point in the past, a previous owner had converted part of the lean to shack into a doghouse. It was filled with straw and this is the place where mother Kitty chose to have her kittens. I seem to recall there were several of them but I can’t recall what happened to the rest.

The one you see in this picture with me I decided to call Blue Eyed Sweet Face Thorpe. I know, pretty dorky, but it did have blue eyes and it was cute as can be. Like its mother it was also a feral cat and so for the next several days my hands were red with scratches.

While we are at it, how about that outfit? Right out of “A Christmas Story”! The plaid buckled jacket and the hat with earflaps. Great! The movie was supposed to be set in the 40s but Scutt Farkas had a coon skin cap on. I don’t know of anything from the 40s that featured coon skin caps. It was not until the 50s that kids started sporting them after seeing Davy Crockett. The rest of the movie was just like my life; the clothes, the neighborhood, seeing Santa, the scary octopus furnace in the basement, and of course, the neighborhood bullies.

In the first picture you will notice that the Kitty is sitting on a box. It is the packing box from our brand-new television. Like most kids I had more fun playing in that box than I did watching the TV itself. We weren’t the first ones in the neighborhood to get a television. The McCoys had one and we would go down to their house and watch cartoons right after school. There weren’t as many cartoons then is there are these days. I remember it was a big deal though.

Mom said that there is another, grimmer, part of this story. In those days we had milk delivered. The milkman would leave it outside the door in an insulated box that kept the milk cold. Apparently, Judy thought that this would make a nice little house for the Kitty. She put it in the milk box but forgot about it. Mom said she never had the heart to tell Judy.

In the future as I come across other pictures that remind me of things, I will write an entry in this blog like today’s.