Cat Trapping

Some gatophobes commit felicide. They belong to the middle stratum of cat-haters. Others so morbidly hate & fear cats that they are too paralyzed by one's presence to be able to kill it. More normal and far more numerous are those gatophobes whose comparatively mild aversion to cats finds expression only in "s-s-scatting," throwing shoes, occasional kidnapping.

Residents of Manhattan's smart East End Avenue and Henderson Place did not know what they had to contend with when their cats began to disappear last fortnight. Even a socialite cat may stray, but when Writer Gilbert Seldes' Daisy, Lawyer Walter Richmond Herrick's Tiddles and several other pets vanished in quick succession it began to look as though there were a gatophobe in the neighborhood. Peter Herrick, 10, whose favorite pet Tiddles had been for some seven years, took to his bed with a fever, would not be comforted.

One night Timothy, other Herrick cat, also disappeared. Few hours later the anxious family was awakened by a faint, insistent mewing. Mr. Herrick traced the cries to the backyard of his next-door neighbor, Broker John Parkinson Jr. Pushing aside a loose fence paling, he beheld a specially-designed cat trap containing Timothy and the remains of some stale fish.

Next morning a patrolman, two detectives and an S. P. C. A. agent descended on the Parkinson yard, confiscated the cat trap. Revealed as trapper was newly-married Elizabeth Bliss Parkinson, daughter of quiet, publicity-shy Cornelius Newton Bliss, charitarian and Metropolitan

Opera director, whose sister was the late famed Art Patron Lizzie P. Bliss, and whose father was William McKinley's Secretary of the Interior. Disliking cats, Bride Parkinson had been sympathetic when her servants complained of nightly prowling & yowling. She decided to act when some cats leaped through her windows while she was entertaining dinner guests. She got a trap from the International Cat Investigating Society (to which Lawyer Herrick, then New York City's Park Commissioner, had sent a letter of encouragement when it formed in 1931 to agitate for licensing of the city's pet cats, destruction of its strays). Last week the Society's Secretary & General Manager James M. Loughborough said he had taken seven cats from the Parkinson trap, loosed them a mile and a half downtown. While Peter Herrick lay inconsolably abed, police, S. P. C. A. and the Women's League for Animals were scouring Manhattan for Tiddles. Broker Parkinson called on the Herricks to apologize, offer a new kitten. Unrepentant was Elizabeth Bliss Parkinson. Wrote she to Mrs. Herrick: "I hope that you will keep your cat in your house in the future during the hours that my trap is set and I hope that you will return the trap that you took away this morning."

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