Illustrations I Loved in My Earliest Years 1

My mother was enamored with books by Wanda Gág (1893–1946), whose Millions of Cats is still in print. When first published in 1928, it won the Newbery Honor Award. Another of her books also received the Newbery, and two others won the Caldecott Honor Award. In New Ulm, Minnesota, Gág’s childhood home is a museum celebrating her life and work. I guess my mother had good taste in authors of children’s books!

Illustration in Wanda Gág’s Millions of Cats

I found Millions of Cats enchanting! Every time my mother read the book aloud to me, I was entranced. My imagination ballooned with vistas of cats. Gág’s art opened my eyes to such surprising possibilities.

On my desk is a snapshot of my mother feeding her cats just outside the door to the porch on our house east of Pine Village, Indiana. With her trademark smile, my mother stands holding an enameled bowl from which she is about to pour something (chicken skin?) onto a plate for the outdoor cats to consume. At my mother’s feet are eight cats looking up at her expectantly. Every tail is pointed straight up. In any given year, my mother fed scraps to perhaps double that number of cats. When I was a child, Gág’s account of herds of cats stretching to the horizon struck me as plausible. After all, did not my mother’s cats multiply with astonishing rapidity?

I never considered that I, too, would be caught feeding cats, cats, and more cats, but, after I moved to a somewhat rural area in Ohio, I began serving chicken and dry food to feral cats. In a peak year a few years back, I was providing dinner for fifteen cats. So I suppose the line between fiction and reality has long been blurred for me.

Gág’s art is so odd as to be captivating. Her trees are heavy lumps yet strangely graceful blobs like cauliflower. Her clouds are handfuls of dough. Cats surround huts as organic looking as igloos. In Millions of Cats, her pointy-nosed “very old man” is elfin. His hat is like a bowl. Gág’s landscapes are never rectangular; rather, they flow like lava diagonally across pages. In short, Gág’s illustrations defy academic analysis. They prompt expressions such as “What a hoot!”

I will admit I am as enthralled today as I was when I first listened to my mother’s voice give expression to Gág’s bizarre story about a flood of felines. The ending of the tale reminds me of my earliest memory, dating to when I had not quite seen two years of life. It was summer, and my mother was working in her large garden where we lived on the edge of town. She had smashed down weeds in a space serving as a crib for me. I could not penetrate the thick profusion of unsmashed weeds about me. Suddenly, a white kitten parted the stems and stepped into my enclosure! I screamed with joy. My mother came running. She scooped me under one arm and the kitten under the other arm and took us both to the breezeway of our house where she fed the kitten a saucer of fresh milk from our dairy. “What shall we name it?” my mother asked. I tried to say “Fuzzy,” and my mother heard “Fuzz,” which became the cat’s name then and there. My father often used the nickname “Lieutenant Fuzz” from the Beetle Bailey cartoon strip. Fuzz lived for many years and “was the most beautiful cat in the whole world.”