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Famous Cats, Room 8 [1]
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Date: 2022-08-02
No one knew where he went during summer vacations but to the delight of the children, when a new school year began he would be back wandering from classroom to classroom, sleeping on desks and sharing students' lunches. After a while, news of this remarkable behavior trickled out. Over the years, there were newspaper articles, a 3-page spread in Look Magazine, a feature in The Weekly Reader, a stint on Art Linkletter's TV show House Party and a cameo on the television documentary, Big Cats, Little Cats. Guitarist Leo Kottke was inspired to compose an instrumental entitled Room 8 and put it on his Mudlark album. The principal of the school and one of the teachers wrote a book about him titled A Cat Called Room 8. That biography is read each year to a new crop of youngsters at the elementary school thus helping keep his memory alive.
According to his biography, Room 8 received more than 10,000 fan letters from 47 states and several foreign countries — sometimes more than 100 letters in one day. Profits from the Room 8 biography paid the postage to respond to his fan mail. It was the cherished duty of the fifth- and sixth-graders to be Room 8's secretaries and respond to each letter, signing the replies with a rubber stamp of Room 8's paw print. It was the greatest honor to be chosen as one of the sixth-graders allowed to go into the teacher's lounge where Room 8 was fed and give him his dinner.
At the ripe old age of 21 or 22, Room 8 passed away and was buried at the Los Angeles Pet Memorial Park in Calabasas where a 3-foot granite tombstone adorns his grave. On August 14, 1968, the day after he died, the Long Beach Press Telegram noted, “The cat with the funny name is survived by pupils who have attended Elysian Heights School since 1952, the year he decided to make the school his home and the children his mascots.” Many of the students and teachers who knew Room 8 have since died, but the school has elected to keep his memory alive. Most notably, his paw prints were preserved in concrete out front of the school in 1964. Students and teachers left memories in concrete after he died. Room 8 is a throwback to those simpler times when schoolhouses and hearts were open to pets and people willing to befriend them.
Students hold Room 8 after his paws were pressed in wet concrete, June 11, 1964.
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