Month: November 2026

Frisky

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Pam’s Pictorama Post: I purchased this sweet, tiny tidbit online a ways back and don’t remember who to credit with selling it to me, although it was on Instagram I think. They sent it along on this bit of cat notepaper I am also sharing below, but first for Frisky.

Frisky is an adorable kitten on a cutout card, only about two inches long. It is amazing that she was tucked away for what was probably a very long time, kept safe for my ultimate acquisition. She is a fluffy, tabby stripe kitten and she bears a sign which says, Born Blind. Below her it says, Frisky, Tag Day Toronto Humane Society. (Although I have never had an entirely blind cat, I am told that they adjust very well to their home surroundings and navigate very successfully.)

I gather that a Tag Day appeal would have consisted of people asking for support on the street and handing these tags out. The Toronto Humane Society was founded in 1887 by John J. Kelso and it was dedicated to promote children’s aid and the humane treatment of animals. (Arguably an odd combination, it shifted solely to the humane treatment of animals in 1891. The Children’s Aid Society then became an independant entity as well.) Much like the hospital I work for now, it was founded primarily in response to the cruel conditions horses and animals on the street suffered. By this time it was obviously caring for domestic animals that needed homes as it does today.

As below, the back of the card reads, We want 75,000 Members. Every Good Citizen should be a member of the Toronto Human Society. Send a dollar to Headquarters, 11 St. Albans Street and you will receive your membership card. I don’t know Toronto especially well, but for those who do I am told that the Humane Society originally found its home on Bay Street, and I am told that St. Albans changed into Wellesley at some point. It is now located on River Street.

Back of card with mailing info – membership was a dollar. Wonder how much they raised and how many members they got.

In its most recent Impact Report the humane society raised about $17.5 million of contributed and program income combined, much of that coming from bequests which is interesting to the fund raiser and former planned giving person. They have an active pet food bank and provide about $5m in below market care annually. Clearly a worthy cause.

As it happens the Humane Society is out in force on the streets of Manhattan right now and I am stopped by them daily as I walk to and from work, asking if I love animals. I have nothing against this form of solicitation, especially from a known charity (although I admit that the lesser known charities doing this can feel a bit scam-my for me), however they ask for reasonably large donations and it is not how I choose to make my charitable contributions. As a fundraiser I know they must raise large amounts of money this way as the cost is fairly high, so it has to be worthwhile.

More or less 3″ x 4.5″ this is just folded over but seems to be designed as a blank card bit of stationary.

I mentioned at the top that this tiny card came with this bit of cat stationary, or blank card, with these two little cats (one smaller than the other) sit in anthropomorphic splendor. One cat, sporting tatty boots, a tunic and trousers, reads a book while eating what I will assume is an apple. The other, a smaller fluffy white kitten, is perched next to him in a dressier suit of clothes with a white ruffle around his neck. They sit on something which looks like a bench but sort of morphs into something that almost appears to be a windowsill. There is no maker or production mark although this tiny illustration is finely done.

Detail getting us a bit closer look.

Since they came to me together and one is so tiny I will keep them that way as I tuck them away in the Pictorama library for future generations.

With Best Wishes

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Pam’s Pictorama Photo Post: Apologies if I seem to be rushing the season a bit but this fellow has been haunting the top of my desk and I guess I just thought he deserved his day. Such a precise little tabby – I said he but really if I had to guess looking at it, I would say this is actually a girl cat – something about the precision of her. She is sporting some bells, and we will assume that they are in the jingle bells sense, although they could also be worn in service of warning birds of her less than benign intent. For better or worse I am not sure she is catching any mice with it on.

The mousing question is a big one, especially in the context of bird catching and outdoor cat behavior in general. We silly humans would like our cats to draw a line between killing rodents and birds. All this led to mom making her cats indoor ones decades ago – although there were other factors like increase in car traffic, dogs and more. Betty loved birds though and I can only think of one or two occasions when her beloved cats brought her up short with this issue.

Our enormous orange tabby, Pumpkin, was guilty of it once – however the same cat caught water rats as well which seemed like a good thing. There was an almost endless stream of mole, vole and mouse bodies left strewn around as gifts. (My sister Loren had a cat, a tuxie named Milkbone, who left her just the heads and lined them up on the stairs. Their house had a serious mouse issue.)

I think we tried bells briefly, but our cats were Houdini’s in training and always slipped out of them virtually immediately. Subsequently the issue of the collars getting caught on things became a concern and the collar and bell was a brief venture indeed. (And as someone pointed out online recently, kitty doesn’t want bells ringing in their face constantly either.)

Peaches perched on the stairs the other morning.

It is my belief that it is the girl cats who carry on the grand feline tradition of hunting, although boys certainly will – Pumpkin as an example. However as I have said before in a now oft told tale, when my friend Winsome discovered a murdered mouse in the house in New Jersey (silly, silly mouse to visit a house with five cats) without having any way to know, I put my money on Peaches, the feral female as the cat in question. (For a recent post about Peaches great escape into the outdoors and fetching her home go here.) If something unwanted showed up in the apartment I admit it would be Cookie not Blackie that I would fetch to the rescue. (Recent readers know that I encountered a mouse in my building’s gym the other day, mentioned in a post here. Evidently my chatter about it that morning gave my trainer mousie dreams that evening. I am guilty of sort of tossing a cat in the direction of an undesirable visitor such as a water bug and hoping for rescue.)

Photo postcards of Lindburgh by Underwood.

However, even for me I have digressed greatly. Today on this holiday postcard we have this chipper and fine-looking feline with a nice white bib and bright white feet tucked together. Her striped tail is wrapped around here, and the aforementioned jingle bells are in a string around her neck. She is focused on something off camera and perched on a patterned tablecloth of sorts. There is something subdued about the card – an enthusiastic holiday greeting it is not quite. The focus is sharp on her face and chest but then blurs a bit, bringing that part of her forward. It is an unusually good photograph of kitty.

This card was never mailed however, oddly, on the back someone has written, With love from Marjorie to Mary. This is my little pet cat. However, this is a professional card distributed by the E. A. Underwood, Gold St. Studio, Saffron Walden. Portrait & Landscape Photographer. So our writer is just kidding when she says it is her pet cat – an undemanding one at the very least.

Underwood had several postcards of Yankee Stadium.

Meanwhile, Underwood is a somewhat underwhelming postcard company of the early 20th century devoted primarily to people and places – many seem to be painted pictures of pretty girls (some with men), Yankee Stadium, Charles Lindburgh. The company was, as above, located in Saffron Walden in Essex, England. This card seems a bit different for them as those examples that are not illustrations as above are colored photos of locations.

So Pictorama kicks off the greater holiday cat season today with a soft jingle jangle. Let the cat celebrations begin.

A Basket Full of Baby

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Pam’s Pictorama Photo Post: This little fellow wandered into the house via one of the postcard shows. It seems properly autumnal for today, which for future readers I will note is November 1 and Marathon Day here in New York City. (It looks like a prime day for it at 41 degrees, sunny and less windy than it has been.) It is also the day after Halloween and the day the clocks roll back so a sort of busy weekend here in Manhattan. The yellow fall light is putting us in the harvest moon and speaking of that we have enjoyed a few enormous moons, one which was also a glorious red.

I can’t be absolutely sure, but I believe this little fellow is Rags, aka The Famous Rotography Cat. (An earlier post on him can be read here and another recent post with him here.) Here he looks young and somewhat kittenish, adolescent maybe, and like perhaps he had a long day of posing and is about to put his nose down and do some serious sleeping. So much for hard work that day.

In addition to Rags, I always think that the Rotograph photo studios must have had a constant, roiling pack of kittens churning through the studio for photos, although Rags was a constant star and ruled the roost into adulthood. (I just found that there is a children’s book dedicated to him and using Rotograph photos as illustrations.) I do hope all the little ones found good homes if they were no longer tiny and less useful to the photographers.

The basket here is one that could hold any kind of fruit but this time of year my mind turns to apples. Although our modern world makes apples available to us year-round (in reality they have always stored well in a cool place), there is nothing like the apples of fall here in the New York area.

I worked with someone at Jazz, Wynton’s former assistant Edith, who was a sort of apple expert and connoisseur. Evidently, she had deep knowledge of all the different kinds; we only discussed it once or twice. Although I am somewhat flexible, I have a deep affection and preference for Macintosh apples which sadly have fallen out of favor. For me their level of tartness and texture is just right, however I gather that being slightly softer they are harder to ship and therefore less desirable. Also, being open to certain fungus they are also unlikely to be organic.

I have toyed with planting a Macintosh apple tree in the yard in New Jersey. The winters are a bit hard for them I gather and I have not mastered the burlap wrap for the winter which I would need to. Meanwhile, I would plant in the late spring, hopefully in a sunny spot. Three to five years for first real crop. Worth thinking about.

A particular favorite leaf from Kim this week.

Having said that (and digressed considerably), this basket could just as easily have contained peaches or pears or other things. There is a bit of wire (I would worry about that with the kitty) sticking up which actually gives the card a little more visual interest. The Rotograph copyright is just on the lower left of the basket and in script, A basket full. With the black table on a black background, it is all velvety dark and the surface of the card is mat, contributing further to this effect.

Unfortunately, this attractive effect also makes the written note at the bottom near to impossible to make out. It appears to say, From, baby Sleep (?) To Baby Bartes. It was mailed from Schenectady, New York on April 26, 1907 at 9 AM. It was sent to Carrie Bartes, West Berne, alt bo (?) NY. At the bottom it also says, c/o Mrs. Bartes. It was received in West Berne on April 27 with no time stamp. I don’t know what the alt bo referred to and instead of Miss it reads Mip – which a bit of research shows was either the way a double “s” could be written in script or, perhaps as a result, a title occasionally recognized as Mip replacing Miss on early marriage certificates etc. (This is really my fact for the day – I had no idea.)

In my postcard posts I feel like people often select an image of a cat and assign it to a pet they were visiting. Occasionally it is an actual picture of said real cat (obviously usually sent by the owner), but sometimes like this it is just a reference and you wonder if Baby actually looked like this or is it just generically cat. Also, the practice of sending postcards to children is very sweet and was a thing. I always imagine how much they must have enjoyed getting them and perhaps that is why they were preserved, tucked away over time. (Although there are clues that perhaps our Miss Carrie Bartes is still too tiny a tot to appreciate this when recieved.) Meanwhile, yes, postcards were sort of the cat videos of their day, being shared with friends and family.

The beginning of November marks the race to the end of the year – always a busy time for fundraisers. However, I have some excellent bits to share over the coming weeks so let the season begin.