Cronkakitty

"What sort of day was it? A day like all days, filled with those events that alter and illuminate our times... and you were there."

May 3, 1953, Sister Ruth and I watched Socrates die after drinking hemlock. We were there. So were Walter Cronkite, John Cassevetes, and E. G. Marshall. It was the day after Hussein was crowned king of Jordan and two days before Aldous Huxley tried LSD for the first time.

I had no idea who Socrates was on May 3, 1953, hemlock either, and you’d think the You Are There episode that would spring to mind would be a more dramatic re-enactment, like the Hindenburg or the Salem witch trial, but I immediately thought of Socrates when I heard that Walter Cronkite died. It left quite an impression that he was passionate and knowlegable about some Greek guy who'd been dead over 2,000 years. I guess that's why we admired Cronkite from the get-go. even before he took over the CBS Evening News (I later learned this particular show was allegorical - You Are There quietly employed several McCarthy-blacklisted writers).

Another memorable day, it was in 1955, but I can’t wiki-verify it, Casey Powell asked me if I could adopt a cat and three kittens. I asked my mom and she said okay. It wasn’t really that big a deal out on the farm – our cat count often got as high as 40 some years and only a few made it through the winter. I went over Casey’s place and his mom was very grateful that we could take the cats since they were moving when the school year ended. I went to the porch with them, where the kittens were nursing in a cardboard box. And there she was – the most beautiful cat I had ever seen.

She was a calico.

Our cats mostly had tiger markings, with some splotches of white here and there. All short-haired. The Spanglers up the road also had lots of seasonal cats and they had a few that were grey, but I always considered these inferior cats. Some people, friends and relatives, had onesie-twosie housecats that were special. All white, angora, longhair. These cats were considered “too good” for us.

Since this was a very special cat, I wanted her to have a very special name, something that immediately conveyed that she was “high class.” So I named her after Walter Cronkite. Now there were a few other cats that had two names, mostly from baseball players like Ted Williams or Al Kaline. There was Jim Finigan, an infielder, mostly forgotten now, who played 5 years in the AK, but a feline legend in the Hinrichs household as the hayloft cat that would tremble in fear and eventually poop behind the sofa if you brought him indoors, say on a Wednesday evening when mom and dad went to town.

The new cat was better than all those, so instead of naming her “Walter Cronkite.” A derivative name was chosen. I’d learned from early TV adverts that putting an “A” in the middle of a name conveyed status, such as to the Dazey “Seal-A-Meal.” I took the “Cronk” from Cronkite” added “kitty,” and put an “A” in the middle, making her “Cronk-a-kitty,” a beautiful name for a beautiful cat.

We called her that for a few days, but one day, my mother was hanging up sheets on the clotheslines and heard me calling to Cronkakitty. “What’s that?” She laughed, “SICK CAT?” I nearly doubled up in emotional anguish. I tried to explain how I’d come up with this very special name for a very special cat, but she would hear none of it. “’Krank’ means ‘sick,” she’d assert. And indeed it did, in German, the language of her youth.

For most of the summer, I defended the line I’d drawn in the litter box and persisted in calling her Cronkakitty, but every time mom heard it she’d laugh again, just as loud as the first time, and say “SICKCAT!"

One day, the three kittens, who were still of nursing age, up and died. It turned out that Cronkakitty was pregnant again and had “dried up.” A similar fate met the next batch of kittens.

By early the next year, a disturbing Darwinian trend was obvious. Cronkakitty was pregnant nearly all the time and all her kittens always died, from one thing or another. So much for “high class,” I had to concede. This was definitely a trailer park cat, certainly not worthy of Cronkite. So it was tacitly agreed and she officially became Sickcat.

Over the next few years, Sister Ruth and I kept track of the number of kittens Sickcat had. The total, before she herself expired, was about 128. Not a single one lived. There was one we had high hopes for, in her third or fourth year, that made it to nearly 12 months, but then it too shed its mortal coil.

And that’s the way it is.