By Felicity Bosk
John Beecroft graduated from UW-Superior in 1921, and student archive assistant Samantha Wolf has recently been going through some of his letters, correspondence and other documents for her independent study. One thing they were surprised to find was a large collection of photographs of his cats.
"He was part of the literary guild, it was basically a national book club put on by Doubleday books," said Wolf. "The 1950’s and 1960’s is when he was really in there. He was the one who decided what books would be chosen for the book club so he was kind of a big deal which is why we have his things. The interesting thing is that he was a dork for cats. People have always been crazy for cats. He had four of them himself at one point."
Wolf then showed a Christmas card he had given one year that only had pictures of his cats, other photographs he had take of them, and a booklet from a company called Ethicon. It is filled with pictures of cats and captions underneath such as one disgruntled feline saying "never again will I trust an intern!"
"Its interesting, Ethicon is a medical suture company and they decided to put out the cat-a-log because suture's were often called the cat guts even though it wasn’t really a cat gut. So here is a book of cat memes from the 1950’s. It is hilarious. Some of them you would need to be in that time period to make sense but some of them are still pretty relevant," said Wolf.
The library has plans to scan the images of Beecroft's cats and the cat-a-log and begin weekly "caturday" posts on Saturdays on social media.
"its unreal how much this guy how much he liked his cats," said Wolf. "Its funny because Beecroft wrote two children’s books about his cats and we’ve got two mockups before they went to print, illustrations and all. He edited a book called plain and fancy cats which was a compilation of short stories. He was a dork for his cats."
The reason Wolf is been studying Beecroft is not because of his cats, but because of the books he chose for the bookclub.
"He was working during and after World War 2... he was part of a group called the Council of Books in War Time where they didn’t want to be all patriotic, just American stuff, they wanted to bring in books from the countries they were at war with to humanize them," she said.
Beecroft received his undergraduate degree from UWS but went on to study at Columbia University and continued to live in New York for most of his life.