My boss was Sumner Curtis, who later became a Washington political writer. “As a cub aide to the Madison correspondent of the Milwaukee Sentinel, I helped cover sessions of the Wisconsin Legislature in 18. My recollection is they were in a small town in southern or eastern Wisconsin. Some modern historians give Milwaukee as the site of these buildings. It was found between the walls of two buildings which were being torn down. Of all the exhibits, the petrified cat attracted me most. “As a schoolboy in Madison, I spent many hours in the State Historical Rooms, then located in the Capitol building. “With this obiter dicta support, and confident, if trouble comes, that I will have friendly press in my native state, I submit this record: Also he led me to believe that after a half century, the statute of limitations might be invoked as a defense. While he would not permit quotation about a possible case in which a constitutional question might be raised, he recalled – if memory served him right – that under the common law a dead cat was not property, and therefore its taking was not larceny. “I have unofficial assurance from a high judicial authority here in Washington, my good friend the Chief Justice of the United States, that I am safe from legal reprisal. I confess only because the story is a good one. In this tardy confession, I am not trying to ease my conscience. We quote, in part, from his story in the 1950 edition of Once a Year, the Press Club’s annual magazine. So far as is known, the Society, despite its obligations as trustee of the state, has made no serious efforts to recover its property.”īrahany, who went on to an illustrious career as Washington correspondent for the Milwaukee Sentinel and later for The New York Tribune, is now dead of course, but in the dusty archives of the Press Club he left his own version of The Great Madison Cat Snatch and offered a rebuttal. Tom Brahany, a student reporter for the Milwaukee Sentinel, who later became personal secretary to President Woodrow Wilson, and two colleagues, then students at the University, absconded with the cat, which later turned up in the Milwaukee Press Club, where it is still enshrined at this writing as the sacred mascot of the organization. When the imprisoning building was torn down, the fossilized cat was discovered and promptly sent to the Society. “The Society some time before the turn of the century received from Darlington a desiccated black cat which once upon a time had been literally immured. Leafing through a 1967 history of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, we came across this enlightening paragraph: What is the true tale of mummified Anubis, the sacred Press Club cat, emblem of the Milwaukee Press Club and mascot of Milwaukee newspaperdom? Believe it or not, back in 1897 it “followed” a couple of errant reporters home from Madison.ĭid these editors foretell the future? It’s a two-sided story and both deserve to be told.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |