There was much sorrow and indignation among the men on board the USS Indiana on April 27, 1903. That day, there were about six men on the battleship’s sick list. C. Buster, the battleship cat, was also on the sick list.
“C. Buster!” the ship’s surgeon called out. Letting out a plaintive meow and hopping on three legs, the battleship cat responded to the doctor’s summons. Not able to explain his injury, the cat held up his paw and allowed the doctor to examine it…
In 1951, the Brooklyn Dodgers were favored to win the National League race. The 1950 World Champion New York Yankees were expected to come in second place in the American League. That April, the two teams played against each other in a three-game exhibition series. The first game took place at Yankee Stadium on Friday, April 13. A black cat may have brought some good luck to the Dodgers that day…
Tom and his brother cat were born in Gage & Tollner’s restaurant in 1917, when the famous oyster bar and chophouse was on the ground floor of the circa 1875 Craft building at 372-374 Fulton Street. No one knows what happened to his mother and brother, but Tom “apparently recognized his proper sphere in life” and stayed on at Gage & Tollner, where he dined on scallops alongside great icons like Mae West and Jimmy Durante.
A gaunt tabby cat, a tiny poodle, and a few hysterical children walk into a church… No, this is not the start of a bad bar joke, but it was the start of a comedy of errors that took place at St. Paul’s Roman Catholic Church in the Cobble Hill section of Brooklyn on May 2, 1897. According to The New York Times, “never before had such a commotion been raised in this church.”
Mrs. Elizabeth W. Berhm, a kindly widow of about 61 years old, had always devoted herself to animals. She was known in her Carnegie Hill neighborhood as the “cat woman” because her home was always open to stray cats. In her small, two-room apartment at the rear of 172 East 85th Street, milk and kindness were always waiting for any cat that needed it.
No doubt, then, the neighbors must have been shocked to learn that Elizabeth had almost taken the life of her own pet cat, Dunder, while she committed suicide.
