“This nice family,” Kay said, with barely disguised amazement, “is from Rhode Island. They’ve come to meet Dewey.”
The father extended his hand. “We were in Minneapolis, so we decided to rent a car and drive down. The kids just love Dewey.”
Was this man crazy? Minneapolis was four and half hours away. “Wonderful,” I said, shaking their hands. “How did you find out about Dewey?”
“We read about him in Cats magazine. We’re cat lovers.”
Obviously.
“Okay,” I said, because I couldn’t think of anything else. “Let’s go meet him.”
Dewey was, thank goodness, as eager to please as always. He played with the children. He posed for photographs. I showed the little girl the Dewey Carry, and she walked him all around the library on her left shoulder (always the left). I don’t know if it was worth the nine-hour round trip, but the family left happy.
“That was weird,” Kay said once the family was gone.
“It sure was. I bet that never happens again.”
It happened again. And again. And again. And again. They came from Utah, Washington, Mississippi, California, Maine, and every other corner of the map. Older couples, younger couples, families. Many were traveling cross-country and drove one hundred, two hundred miles out of their way to stop in Spencer for the day. I can remember many of their faces, but the only names I remember are Harry and Rita Fein’s from New York City because after meeting Dewey they sent both a birthday present and a Christmas present of twenty-five dollars every year for food and supplies. I wish I had thought to write down information on the others, but at first it seemed so unlikely more people would ever come. Why bother? By the time we realized the power of Dewey’s appeal, visitors were so common they no longer seemed unusual enough to take note of.
How were these people finding out about Dewey? I have no idea. The library never pursued publicity for Dewey. We never contacted a single newspaper, with the exception of the Spencer Daily Reporter. We never hired a publicity agent or marketing manager. After Shopko, we never entered Dewey in any contests. We were Dewey’s answering service, nothing more. We picked up the phone, and there was another magazine, another television program, another radio station wanting an interview. Or we opened the mail and found an article about Dewey from a magazine we’d never heard of or a newspaper halfway across the country. A week later, another family popped up at the library.
What were these pilgrims expecting to find? A wonderful cat, of course, but there are wonderful cats sitting homeless in every shelter in America. Why come all this way? Was it love, peace, comfort, acceptance, a reminder of the simple joys of life? Did they just want to spend time with a star?
Or were they hoping to find a cat, a library, a town, an experience that was genuine, that wasn’t from the past or for the moment, that was different from their lives but somehow familiar? Is that what Iowa is all about? Maybe the heartland isn’t just the place in the middle of the country; maybe it’s also the place in the middle of your chest.
Whatever they were after, Dewey delivered. The magazine articles and newscasts touched people. We received letters all the time that started, “I’ve never written to a stranger before, but I heard Dewey’s story and . . .” His visitors, all of them, left smitten. I know this not only because they told me or because I saw their eyes and their smiles but because they went home and told people the story. They showed them the pictures. At first they sent letters to friends and relatives. Later, when the technology caught on, they sent e-mails. Dewey’s face, his personality, his story, it all magnified. He received letters from Taiwan, Holland, South Africa, Norway, Australia. He had pen pals in half a dozen countries. A ripple started in a little town in northwest Iowa, and somehow the human network carried it all over the world.
Whenever I think of Dewey’s popularity, I think of Jack Manders. Jack is now retired, but when Dewey arrived he was a middle school teacher and the president of our library board. A few years later, when his daughter was accepted at Hope College in Holland, Michigan, Jack found himself attending a reception for the parents of incoming freshmen. As he stood there in an elegant Michigan nightspot slowly sipping a martini, he fell into conversation with a couple from New York City. Eventually they asked where he was from.
“A small town in Iowa you’ve never heard of.”
“Oh. Is it near Spencer?”
“Actually,” he told them with surprise, “it is Spencer.”
The couple perked up. “Do you ever go to the library?”
“All the time. In fact, I’m on the board.”
The charming, well-dressed woman turned to her husband and, with an almost girlish giggle, exclaimed, “It’s Dewey’s daddy!”
A similar thing happened to another board member, Mike Baehr, on a cruise in the South Pacific. During the meet and greet, Mike and his wife realized many of their fellow passengers had never even heard of Iowa. At about the same time, they realized cruises had a social hierarchy based on how many cruises you’d been on, and since this was their first cruise, they were at the bottom of the pecking order. Then a woman came up to them and said, “I hear you’re from Iowa. Do you know Dewey, the library cat?” What an icebreaker! Mike and Peg were off the outcast list, and Dewey was the talk of the cruise.
This is not to say everyone knew Dewey. No matter how famous and popular Dewey became, there was always someone with no idea Spencer Public Library had a cat. A family would drive from Nebraska to see Dewey. They would bring gifts, spend two hours playing with him, taking pictures, talking with the staff. Ten minutes after they left, someone would come up to the desk, obviously worried, and whisper, “I don’t want to alarm you, but I just saw a cat in the building.”
“Yes,” we would whisper back. “He lives here. He’s the world’s most famous library cat.”
“Oh,” they’d say with a smile, “then I guess you already know.”
The visitors who truly touched me, though, the ones I remember clearly, were the young parents from Texas and their six-year-old daughter. As soon as they entered the library, it was clear this was a special trip for her. Was she sick? Was she dealing with a trauma? I don’t know why, but I had the feeling the parents offered her one wish, and this was it. The girl wanted to meet Dewey. And, I noticed, she had brought a present.
“It’s a toy mouse,” her father told me. He was smiling, but I could tell he was intensely worried. This was no ordinary spur-of-the-moment visit.
As I smiled back at him, only one thought was going through my mind: “I hope that toy mouse has catnip in it.” Dewey would regularly go through periods where he wanted nothing to do with any toy that didn’t contain catnip. Unfortunately this was one of those times.
All I said was, “I’ll go get Dewey.”
Dewey was asleep in his new fake fur–lined bed, which we kept outside my office door in front of a heating unit. As I woke him up I tried a little mental telepathy: “Please, Dewey, please. This one’s important.” He was so tired, he barely opened his eyes.
The little girl was hesitant at first, as many children are, so the mother petted Dewey first. Dewey lay there like a sack of potatoes. The girl eventually reached out to pet him, and Dewey woke up enough to lean into her hand. The father sat down and put both Dewey and the girl on his lap. Dewey immediately snuggled up against her.
They sat like that for a minute or two. Finally the girl showed him the present she had brought, with its carefully tied ribbon and bow. Dewey perked up, but I could tell he was still tired. He would have preferred to snooze in the girl’s lap all morning. “Come on, Dewey,” I thought. “Snap out of it.” The girl unwrapped the gift, and sure enough, it was a plain toy mouse, no catnip in sight. My heart sank. This was going to be a disaster.