Whenever I think of Donnie Hofeldt, the young blond boy in the two pictures above, I recall a very sad day. We used to have a foot-deep children's pool in our backyard. It had a metal-segmented frame on the outside to keep it stiff and upright. It also had an inflated circular top.
One day we were playing in their backyard. We did not know that Donnie had wandered over into our backyard and seized upon the bright idea to toss our two kittens into the pool. We heard these terrific yowls for a couple of minutes before reacting, not knowing what was going on.
I believe I was the first to realize that our kittens were in severe distress, and I raced over to our backyard where the yowls were coming from. We had had a housekeeper who left to return to Arkansas where she was from. She was unable to take her beautiful little, multi-colored kitten and gave her to us. I had a kitten of my own at the time, Tiger, a tabby.
When I arr rived at the pool, I saw the little girl kittie floating on her side in the pool, water streaming into her open mouth. I grabbed her soaked form and dragged her to the lawn. Fortunately for Tiger, Donnie had tossed a stool into the pool, and Tiger had his front legs up on the stool to keep from drowning.
My parents would no sooner have thought to rush the stricken kittie to a vet than they would have thought to take a flight to the moon. The lives of pets were cheap and short. They bought us chicks at Easter and gave them to us to care for. Despite our best intentions, the chicks always died. That night we put the little kittie into the spare bathroom with heat on, along with Tiger to keep her company. Sadly, she died during the night.
Asked why he had thrown both kittens into the pool, he responded, "Kitties wanted to go swimming." Then why had he also thrown the stool into the pool? "Kitties wanted something to sit on," he innocently replied. He was too young to know that what he had done was terribly thoughtless and wrong.
But then we had had two different kittens a couple of years before. We had gotten them from friends of the family. After we left their house, we realized that we could not find the kittens anywhere. We retraced our route back to the friends' house, but no kittens. When we arrived again at home, I thought to look under the front seat, and there, sleeping peacefully in a corner, were the two kittens. Not many months later, all of us kids came down with ring worm: the Hofeldt girls, Georgann and me, and I believe the Tiptons, too. The adults figured that the two cats were the likely source. We had to rub a green, gooey medicine on the lesions for a few weeks to finally get rid of them.
The real mystery was what happened to those two young cats? We never had them again, and I would not long after own Tiger instead. Perhaps the adults simply drown them both, or took them somewhere far away and released them. But we never saw those cats again, and we were never told what had happened to them--they simply ceased to be around. Again, why the parents had not taken the cats to a vet to have them cured obviously did not enter their thoughts. Even when we owned Tiger, he was always an outdoor cat because we never even had a litter box in the house.
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