Mostly what we came to know about the cat that Denise and the Tange-kids named Niki, was that she was unfailingly sweet. I personally wasn’t all that keen on adding her to our household at the time. I was too partial to my cat Jet, who was nearing the age of two. Nikki appeared to be even younger, although she wasn’t a kitten by any means. But I was protective of Jet’s turf. When my parents agreed to let Denise keep her, it was with the understanding that she would be an outdoor cat, while Jet would remain indoors.

Probably the only picture of Niki and me

Soon enough though, Niki charmed her way into the house. Jet was less than happy, and although he tried to pick on her now and then, there wasn’t much he could do since he didn’t have claws. Niki, to her credit, understood that she was on Jet’s turf and always tolerated his antics – even though she could have gashed him bad at any time. She never once did.

Jet and Niki drawing a Christmas truce in 1985

Eventually she became well-loved by all of us. She meandered in and out of the house at her will and was generally always finding her way onto someone’s lap. I think she sensed the fact that Jet was my cat and she belonged to Denise, but as she and I got older, we warmed up to each other more and more.

Niki passed away on a hot summer day around the Summer of 1993. We found her just outside our front door, lying under a bush. We pegged her age at death at about nine years old. She had been a great pet and I really miss seeing her sweet eyes and gentle disposition.

Sweet Niki

Below is a video I took of Niki trying to catch a bug during the Spring of 1987. She was okay when the camera was on the other side of the fence, but as soon as it crossed over the top, it spooked her and she took off.

Return to the Summer of 1985…

My best guess is that he first came around during the Fall of 1974. He would have been my first real introduction to cats and he obviously had a very docile personality as my love of cats began here and goes on until the present day. You can see actual footage of me with Laddy in the home movie Brad’s Magic as seen here.

Laddy – with odd eye. Not sure if this was part of the accident that Laddy had, but this was only temporary

Laddy tolerates the kid

The fate of Laddy is unknown. My parents professed that he ‘ran away’ so this was what I always thought happened to Laddy. It was only in more recent years that my Mom told me how Laddy had either been hit by a car or was kicked by someone so badly at one point that the veterinarian said that his ‘insides were all rearragned’. My parents spent an ungodly amount of money to have him healed. Mom thinks it was in the neighborhood of $800, which I find hard to believe, considering the 1974 dollar.

Laddy hangs out in our driveway with Mom

Just two pals hanging out on a sunny Spring day in 1975

But sometime between 1975 and 1976, Laddy ‘ran away’. Or obviously died in some fashion. Laddy will always hold a very significant role in my history and my heart as my first kitty.

1974 will continue…

Naturally, the curiosity got the better of me and I asked my folks if I could go out and see the cat that sounded like it was coming from the garage. My Dad warned me that my Christmas present was in the garage and that it would spoil the surprise if I went out there. This only piqued my interest more as I now had the opportunity to see a cat AND get a glimpse of a Christmas present. I didn’t quite put two and two together and realized that the kitten was the Christmas present. I asked my Dad if he had a name, and he said that I could name him whatever I wanted.

Me, Dad, and little Charcoal, not long after his Christmas Eve debut

Since he was gray and very similar looking to the first Charcoal, I decided to name this kitten Charcoal as well. I loved Charcoal and he was a very amiable cat, but unfortunately since I was just six years old, I wasn’t always very gentle with Charcoal, sometimes tugging too hard on his collar and flinging him across the room. I have never forgiven myself for these childish acts of stupidity.

But I quickly grew out of that phase and Charcoal and I became an inseparable kid-and-cat duo. Charcoal made the move with us to Winterset Drive in April of 1978  and was both an indoor and outdoor cat.

Unfortunately, Charcoal did not enjoy a very long life. We had not had a very good run of luck with our cats thus far and Charcoal 2 was no exception. He became very ill at some point around the late Spring of 1980. We had quarantined him to our laundry room for a few days and one Friday night while Mom and I were watching TV in the family room, we heard a thump sound come from there. Naturally I was concerned and had Mom peek in on him.

I’ll never forget her words as she looked down on him and said “Brad, I think he’s dead.” I wanted to go in and check but she made me wait a few minutes. Then I went in, knelt beside him and called out his name. No response. Through teary eyes, I said “he must be dead.” That night is still completely vivid and tearjerking in my head.

The next day, I couldn’t keep from crying and my Dad tried to cheer me up by telling me to think about something else…to think about The Flying Deuces, the Laurel and Hardy film that was going to be broadcast on television the next day and we were going to record on VHS.

Charcoal lives on in my head as a close companion during my childhood. After the bad luck we had had with cats, my parents decided that we weren’t going to get any more pets in the near future. It would be three years later before they finally changed their mind.

Return to Christmas 1977…

Yes, I can and do generally go on and on about how fast December gets here after Halloween and then how fast it then proceeds to fly by as we all make Christmas preparations, but it has become so passe to talk about the rapid passing of time that I’m sick of hearing it and saying it. So once it arrived, I just held on tight and tried to get as much done as I could before the Christmas deadline.

Work was a bit hectic right from the get-go as we opened up three stores within two weeks – Price Hill on December 3, a Hebron, Kentucky Marketplace on December 4, and the new store in Lawrenceburg, Indiana on December 11. I actually skipped the grand opening at Price Hill so I could concentrate on the next two openings. I spent the nights in Holiday Inns on the 2nd and 10th in preparation for early morning arrivals at opening stores located so far from home. Once these grand openings were done (these three made a total of five in a month’s time), it was a great relief to be back to business as usual at work.

On December 4, I got the bad news that Denise’s cat Stymie had died. Denise was forced to make the difficult but humane choice to have him put to sleep. His kidneys had been failing and he was down to five pounds, so the sad time finally came to say goodbye. You might recall that Stymie was originally my cat that I gotten in 1995. He had had a full life of thirteen highly-mischievous years.

This is most likely Stymie’s last photo - taken on August 1, 2008

The first weekend of the month saw a lot of activity, beginning with the inaugural meeting of The Chimp tent of the Sons of the Desert in Cincinnati on Saturday, December 6. As a former member of my Dayton A-Haunting We Will Go tent, Gene Sorkin decided to continue the legacy of our area by heading up a new chapter to bring Laurel and Hardy film screenings back into the public. Although it will be difficult for me to make too many of the future meetings, I certainly wanted to be there for the first one to pass the so-called torch to Gene.

After a bumpy, yet humorous, start where no one could figure out how to work the video projector (he was using a Mac rather than a normal DVD player), we all enjoyed a round of shorts that included the cartoon Hollywood Steps Out, Our Gang’s Beginner’s Luck, and L&H in Big Business, Hog Wild, and Dirty Work. Like she had done at a couple of my meetings, Cincinnatian Joan Chrislip was on hand to play live keyboard accompaniment to Big Business. She is simply amazing and I was so glad that she agreed to play at the meeting.

The meeting of twenty people was a success and I hope it is indicative of future meetings of the tent. There was a nice cake, door prizes, and plenty of snacks to keep everyone entertained as they socialized between films.

Cake honoring the inaugural event

‘Unstaged’ photo of me passing the torch to Gene

Gene chats with me while I enjoy my soda

Bruce and Joan Chrislip chat while I enjoy my chips (see a pattern here?)

Group photo of about 75% of the meeting attendees

It was on the way home that things got messy. I was chatting with my friend Bob Satterfield on the phone when all of the sudden, it felt as if I was driving over uncharted land, my car bobbing up and down and shaking. Turns out that I had a flat tire. I pulled off the road in a parking lot near the Dayton Mall and investigated. Not only was it cold and dark, but it was also raining. Tried as I did to get the car jacked up to replace the flat with the spare, I did not have the skill or patience to get it done in that kind of weather, so I called my stepdad Bob to come and help me. More than an hour after I first had pulled off the road, he got the spare tire on, with no help coming from the policeman who came to investigate what I was doing in the lot of a closed business.

After it was all over and I had traded cars with Mom so Bob could take mine and have it fixed, I decided I needed to stop off and meet Heidi and her friend Jen at Scor, a pub in Bellbrook for a much-needed beer. It was nice to hang out with them for a while after the stressful evening, but naturally that almost went completely sour when they nearly got into a fistfight…with each other! Now I like a good catfight as much as the next guy, but by that time it just helped to solidify the after-L&H evening as…another nice mess.

As we started the next week, Heidi visited on Sunday the 7th to watch Leatherheads on DVD. I was also just finishing up The Addams Family series DVD and moved on to the first season of WKRP in Cincinnati, followed by my DVDs of The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. This is part of my quest to watch every episode of every ‘good’ sitcom that is on DVD. See? Eclectic.

Throughout the weeks of December (which saw temperatures bobbing up and down, occasional sun and occasional shower, but never snow…at least any that stuck), I was not only working at work, but also preparing for Christmas with (mostly online) shopping. After the Lawrenceburg opening on the 11th, I took a much-needed day off (which made up for the Saturday I worked at Kenwood) on Friday the 12th. That night Heidi hosted a small party at her house which ensured that I wouldn’t be getting anything productive done for the next couple of days.

Her friends Megan, Jason, and Cierrah all came over and brought along Jagermeister and Red Bull – for a Jager Bomb concoction – and a bagful of Jello shots. Needless to say, I was out until about 5am that night and had almost no sleep going into Saturday. How old am I again?

Me with Heidi’s friend Megan

 Megan, Cierrah, and Jason get wild when the music starts

 Heidi looks innocent, and yet…

Scraping the last drop of the Jello shot

Things were a bit more subdued on Saturday the 13th as Mom and I met up with Grandpa and Diana & Tom and we all went to the 90th birthday party of my Grandpa’s brother Duane. He had turned 90 on December 9 and is currently living in a nursing home in the Carriage Inn Nursing Home of Dayton, so this is where we held the gathering. There were good snacks, cake, and beverage on hand, but what was most interesting was seeing some of Mom’s cousins who were there. Duane and his wife Norma were both there along with their children Bobbie and Mike. Mike had flown in from North Carolina.

With Duane, who refuses to smile. When you’re 90, you have a right to make that call.

Diana and Mom with their cousins (Duane and Norma’s children) Bobbie and Mike

Way back in 1984, after my Mom’s cousin Bobbie had separated from her husband, she began spending a lot of time with our family. My parents and her would often go out and many times Bobbie’s daughter Becky and I would be left to babysit my sister Denise and her brother Charles. So after being with them so often, I got to know and enjoy the company of my second cousin Becky, who was just a few months older than me, as our parents did their own thing. And oftentimes as kids of twelve and thirteen do, we would make a game out of sneaking some of their beer back to my room during the picnics and such that we all attended.

This only lasted about six months or so and then everyone kind of went their separate ways again. I had seen Bobbie at my Grandma Murphy’s funeral in 2006, but I don’t think I had seen Becky since those days in the mid-1980′s. So it was nice to catch up and meet her husband and three kids, one of whom came to liked to call me ‘cousin’.

Duane and Grandpa, two generations removed from mine

Mom and Bobbie, the next generation

And still further down the tree, me and my second cousin Becky. A picture of us together as babies can be seen here.

As my three-day weekend ended, I decided that I better get my butt in gear and start working on our annual family Christmas newsletter, which I first began on the evening of Sunday the 14th. Although I did little else after work for the next four days, I still think it was remarkable that I met my goal of completion on Thursday, December 18.

The newsletter will be coming up next…

 The cat and me

Up close and personal with little Mr. Nameless

Dad not only captured a few photos of the cat, but also took some scenes of this little furrball on Super 8 film – and a few selelct screen grabs are shared here. It is entirely possible that Tiny, my tenth and most recent cat to join me in life’s journey, is the reincarnation of this my first.

Return to early 1973…