It’s cats and more cats. And even more cats.
Cats in frames. Cats on film. Glass cats. Porcelain cats. Cats, cats, cats.
Curiously, there are no real cats, unless you happen to show up on a day when a breeder friend of museum manager Karen Lawrence brings some Maine Coons to show.
“Well, you know, I travel too much,” said Lawrence, who traverses the globe as a cat show judge.
Who says cat ladies are crazy?
The museum is operated by the Cat Fanciers’ Association Foundation, a nonprofit created to preserve the history of cats and the people they control. The foundation opened the museum in 2011 in an imposing granite-clad building that once housed Midland-Buckeye Federal Savings and Loan.
The S&L went belly-up. The cats persevere. This should surprise no one.
Everywhere you look in the place, there are depictions of cats. Cat artwork and calendars cover the walls. Cat figurines fill display cases. Tributes to pets who have gone on to the big cat condo in the sky populate a memorial book.
“Miss you, Mean Kitty,” one is inscribed by what must have been a forbearing owner. Another honors a cat named Epidermis, which was, appropriately, hairless.
Among the museum’s prized possessions is a red cat house designed by one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s proteges for the Tonkens family, for whom Wright designed a human house in Cincinnati. “Residents for Felis catus,” the accompanying architectural drawing is labeled. Spelling, apparently, was not a priority in Wright’s firm.
An entire room in the museum is devoted to maneki-neko cats, the perpetually waving Japanese talismans. Dozens of examples are on display, each with a paw raised in everlasting greeting: a cat that inexplicably resembles a poodle, a cat with a clock in its belly, a set of cat nesting dolls, a cat in the shape of a teapot, its beckoning arm outstretched to form the spout. A ceramic pea pod is filled with pea-size cats, a set of chopsticks poised creepily within reach.
Another room honors the Siamese cat, a breed introduced to America by President Rutherford B. Hayes. He wasn’t the only famous Siamese fan: A computer screen shows members of the regal breed being stroked by celebrities ranging in renown from Laurence Olivier and Jimmy Stewart to Willie Aames of Charles in Charge.
Even the bathroom is decorated with cat memorabilia - Chinese prints of cats on the wall, a cat figure peeking into a mirror on the window ledge, another peering into a small fishbowl.
Virtually everything in the museum was donated. Lawrence has 19 boxes of books for the library, waiting to be unpacked. She’s used to hearing visitors say, “Now I know what to do with my cat collection.”
The museum displays the sublime in the form of cat figurines by such celebrated manufacturers as Waterford, Royal Doulton and Lalique; a bronze sculpture that is the only cat created by famed artist J. Clayton Bright, better known for his horses and dogs; and an ancient, exquisite ceramic likeness of a warrior on a cat’s back that once decorated a roof in China.
And then there’s what some might consider the ridiculous, a collection of cat dolls that occupies what was once Midland-Buckeye’s bank vault. There are cats dressed like kings and queens, cat brides and grooms, a feline Cinderella in a wedding-cake gown and a few cats that resemble a young Laura Ingalls Wilder, clad in calico and bonnets.
They may constitute the oddest acquisitions of a museum that capitalizes on the quirky.
“Some of those cat dolls are pretty weird,” Lawrence allowed. “They’re creepy.”
But they’re cats.
And hence, they’re superior.
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