The Yahooti Chronicles

Yahooti was my mom's cat, but he ended up living with my grandparents when my mom and dad married and moved to Boston so dad could finish school.  After dad graduated he was appointed to the church in Elma and they moved into the ramshackle parsonage.  Shortly thereafter my grandparents also moved to Elma, two houses and a church away from the parsonage.  Yahooti then proceeded to divide his time between these two houses. 

I have been doing a bit of research in an attempt to discover the origin of Yahooti's name.  Yehudi Menuhin was a child prodigy back then and Cab Calloway recorded a song called "Where's Yahootie?" which became a popular catchphrase.  "Yahootie" became the name for a mysterious invisible prankster - people blamed him for everything!

Yahooti the cat was a calm soul.  As all cats were back then, he was an indoor/outdoor cat, and he was never neutered.  He stuck pretty close to his two homes, he enjoyed Grandma's lush flower garden, and he especially savored lounging in the shade of the tall peonies.  Hooti was a pretty laid back fellow.  Grandma said she once saw him carefully backing away from a threatening tomcat.  He was not a fighter. 

Here is a pencil drawing done by my uncle in 1941.  The scene depicted was a complete fabrication, artistic license. Hooti would never have been such a bad kitty.  The worst story I ever heard about him was about the paw prints in the frosting on the cake Grandma was about to serve to company.  She saved her reputation by placing walnut halves onto the cake - no one ever suspected the source of her inspiration!

Yahooti by Robert E. McPherson, 1941

Hooti was probably six or seven years old by the time I was born.  My mother got one of her madcap ideas for a great joke to play on her dad.  My grandfather was a skinny nervous kind of man (think Barney Fife).  He had steadfastly refused to "hold the baby" because he was afraid he would drop me.  So Mom weighed Hooti and and she weighed me every day until I weighed exactly as much as the cat.

Mom strolled over to their house with poor Yahooti completely swaddled in my blanket and she finally persuaded Grandpa to hold "me".  Of course by this time Hooti had had quite enough and he exploded out of my startled grandfather's arms.  That story was told and retold many times over the years.  I am not sure if Grandpa ever totally forgave Mom for that stunt.  It is a wonder he had not had a coronary.

Hooti and me

Yahooti was a polydactl - you can see his massive paws in the above photo.  In my childhood relationship with Yahooti I was taught how to behave around cats.  "Don't bother kitty when he's eating."  "Don't pull kitty's  tail."  "If you see kitty burying something in the garden, do not dig it up."  He and I spent many happy hours together and I shared my toys with him.

Yahooti and the mechanical wind-up bear

Yahooti was famous for his occasional forays through the furnace duct work.  Grandma would be trying to clean the vents and Hooti would disappear into the dark tunnel.  He could be heard thumping and banging along, then he would emerge in another room, all covered in dust and cobwebs.  Grandma always made sure to thank him for his assistance, and of course she helped him to restore his coat to its original color by cleaning off the soot.

Hooti was also given credit for inadvertently helping my mom out of a bad situation.   She had gone to the dentist in the city and the session was so lengthy her jaw had locked in the open position.  She came home on the bus, horribly embarrassed and even more frantic than usual.  The dentist had told her the jaw would close sooner or later.  Mom decided to try to take a nap, and as she lay in her bed, Yahooti came into the room and jumped up onto the dresser.  This was strictly forbidden (and he knew it).  Without thinking, Mom tried to yell, "Get down!" and her jaw snapped closed.  She gave him a big hug (how could she have been angry?), he had solved her problem!

Yahooti was probably fourteen or fifteen years old when we received a call from my grandparents that something was very wrong with him.  We no longer lived in Elma but Dad drove us to Grandma and Grandpa's house to assess the situation.  It was decided that Hooti was indeed a very sick kitty and my dad found a box for him and prepared to take him to the vet.  Everyone tried to reassure me that he would be OK, but even though I couldn't have been any more than six or seven I somehow knew that this was the last time I would ever see my little friend.  I remember asking my dad, "Hooti's not coming home, is he?"  I thought my dad would cry, he was so sad when he had to answer, "No, he's not."

Yahooti was the kind of cat who enjoyed life and took it as it came.  He radiated calm as my dad carried him out to the car.  I never saw Hooti again.  Since then I have had jumpy cats and scaredy cats and snuggle-bunny cats and needy cats and super smart cats and mischievous cats - but Hooti was just a big lug, my first big lug.  Yahooti was also my first love and no one ever forgets their first love. 

Collecting: My Thoughts

I collect many things but my oldest and dearest passion has been horses - swap cards, paintings, prints, books and figurines.  It all began when my dad brought home a little china horse for me when I was three years old.  I don't imagine many dads would gift such a young child with so fragile an item, but he was quirky like that, and unbelievably, the figurine remains one of the few in my growing collection that has never been broken.  Clumsiness, kitties and a lot of moving have taken their toll over the years, but this has had an unexpected side benefit - I have learned a lot of ways to repair broken artifacts and people at my shop actually pay me to fix their stuff.

A lot of people collect plastic "model" horses - Breyers and Hartlands .  I did not even know the name Breyer until a couple of years ago, although I had had several in my collection for many years.  Breyers are very realistic looking (for the most part) and there is a massive community that has evolved around their collection.  They make outfits (tack and costumes) and have "horse shows" and take photos with realistic backdrops.  They make manes and tails from real hair and repaint the models with excruciating detail. I have little interest in this; I have my special old Breyers, that is enough for me.

Another community is built around the collection of Hagen Renaker porcelain figurines.  I have about a dozen, dating back to the early fifties, but, again, I did not know anything about them until recently.  Some were gifts but most were bought one at a time, when my dad had to go visit someone in the hospital in Rochester and I went along to keep him company. He rewarded me by taking me downtown to a little gift shop off of Main Street where they sold small china figurines and a good number of novelty items (magic tricks and pranks).  Most in this collection are tiny and spindly and very fragile - and all have at least one broken leg and some have lots of breaks.  I have always repaired them, using increasingly better adhesives as they have become available.

A few years back I acquired a collection of Breyer miniature Stablemates - it took me quite a while to realize that that many of these were identical to my little Hagen Renakers and I was baffled at such seeming design thievery.  I eventually discovered that Hagen Renaker had licensed some of their molds to Breyer for recasting in plastic.  Mystery solved!

Original favorites

In the above photo, Horse Number One is the one in the center.  Clockwise from the upper left is the porcelain foal given to me when I was very young by a little old lady from our church.  She said it had been hers since she was a little girl - I figure it must be almost 150 years old by now, and I have never seen another one like it.  The next one, with the saddle, was made in Japan as a souvenir of Niagara Falls.  Others like it are all over eBay every day.  The grouping of three are Hagen Renakers and designed by Tom Masterson.  The white and gold horse with the spaghetti trim is Queenie, one of the few named horses in my collection.  At least as far as eBay goes, she is pretty unique.  Below Queenie are a pair of Bergen hard plastic horses (I called them Black Beauty and Ginger), and the pair of pintos are salt and pepper shakers.  The jaunty black and white colt and the little white Trojan have always been amongst my favorites and I have had them as long as I can remember.

Current favorites

My taste seems to moved away from mostly realism towards mostly fanciful.  My current favorites all seem to have an artistic style to them.  The one in the middle is one-of-a-kind hand modeled, recently repainted by me because the original paint had become drastically soiled.  I was so delighted to find it in a thrift store.  Upper left is a beautiful pink and blue drip-glazed Royal Haeger, then my collection of little porcelain Trojans (thank you, eBay!), the red rearing horse and the two green rearing ones were designed by Don Manning and I have discovered that they are from the late forties, early fifties.  The little pink gal is a Hagen Renaker (I love her!), the row of colorful colts are also Don Mannings, the elongated green glass colts are made by Mosser, and the white mare and foal are a recent thrift store find.  Aren't they sweet?

I have become a savvy eBay shopper and I have made myself very happy winning these little treasures.   The Internet is proving to be a wondrous resource for researching the origins of my figurines, but much information is lacking. I wish more makers would placed identification marks on their creations!  Not stickers - stickers fall off!   Sadly, I have found only a few books on the collecting of horse figurines. Maybe some day I ought to write a book about the subject, but for now I am keeping myself busy documenting my entire collection.

I am lost in the admiration of the creation of these figures - how lovingly and cleverly and carefully they have been sculpted by such wondrous and mostly unsung artists!  I run my fingers over the elegant lines and shapes.  The beauty makes me smile every day.  I will sing their song.

Horse Collection 1956

Horse Collection 2014