Gimbels & Gumball

As I continue unhoarding/resimplifying, here's my grandmother's card for Gimbels, a chain of department stores that closed for good in 1987. Her last name is misspelled on the card, which is fairly par for the course with that name.

As I wrote in a 2013 post, "Gimbels was around from 1887 to 1987 before being liquidated. It was headquartered in New York City and once had the biggest chain of department stores in the United States. But perhaps its greatest legacy came in Philadelphia. ... It was in the City of Brotherly Love that Gimbels launched the first department-store parade. The first Gimbels Thanksgiving Day Parade was held in Philadelphia in 1920."

In addition to the 2013 post, here are some other posts that have mentioned Gimbels over the years:

• Brighten your summer with vacation specials from Lit Brothers
• Neat stuff from an 1880 volume of Edgar Allan Poe's works
• Moon landing clippings, Part 5

Beembom never threw away an old ID, credit card, driver's license or business card, so I've been pruning them slowly since we cleaned out the house on Oak Crest Lane. This Gimbels one is kind of neat, which is no reason to keep it. But it might fetch a few bucks. It looks like they can sell for about $10 apiece on eBay, so maybe there's a collector/nostalgist out there who wants it and I get enough to buy a few cans of cat food.

Speaking of cats, we have managed to add another one to the household. Outdoor community cat Gumball, who I mentioned in early March, seemed to be sick and struggling, so on April 29 I trapped him (which itself was a minor miracle, because I'd been trying for months to TNR him) and took him to a veterinarian. Turns out he had multiple broken teeth, bad tartar buildup and a gum infection. We got him all fixed up with surgery (including neutering) and now he's staying in our guest bedroom. And here's the amazing part: It turns out he absolutely loves people. He is the sweetest boy. He loves pets and scritches on every part of his body, including his belly. He loves to cuddle. And he hasn't displayed a single antagonistic trait toward people. This strongly reinforces my belief that he wasn't born feral. He must gotten lost from his human family or, more likely, abandoned by human dillweeds. We have several cases like that, sadly, probably including Yinzer and Marmalade, who I also mentioned in March.

Given his love for people, Gumball can't (and won't) just be tossed back outside. So we'll find ways to start integrating him into the household with other cats ... or perhaps there's another human who can offer him a forever home. Either way, he's safe now and he'll get his daily pets and scritches. And, yes, his Temptation treats. And look at those blue eyes! 

Saturday's postcard from Tokyo

Something cheerful for a grim state-of-the-world Saturday: This lovely postcard arrived this week from a fellow Postcrosser in Tokyo, Japan. I love that cat peeking in the doorway. The whole image reminds me of Fruits Basket, for some reason. On the back of the wonderfully decorated card (see below) she writes:

Hello, Chris, my name is Miki and I live in Tokyo. I want to be a journalist in the future, so I'm studying hard. The postcard's picture is Japanese traditional fall event. In Japanese countryside, people make dried persimmons. If you have a chance to visit Japan, I think autumn is the best season. I hope you are having a good day!

Here are some links for more on Hoshigaki (Japanese dried persimmons):

• Persimmons: A Sweet Autumn Tradition in Japan
• Hoshigaki: A Beautiful Fall Tradition
• Why I’m Hand-Massaging Persimmons Every Day (& Loving It)
• The History of Japan’s Autumn Harvest Festivals

Feral cats, March 2026

Put it in the Louvre. That's Mamacita on the right. In the center is her older son Creamsicle 

and on the left is her younger son Splash. 

Cats are a primary reason I don't write 10 blog posts a week. In addition to taking care of the indoor cats, we have "regulars" in the neighborhood feral community who get from us the food and water they need to subsist in the harsh desert climate. (I realize that I repeat myself when it comes to these cat posts, but c'est la vie.)

Here's the current March 2026 rundown on the feral/community kitties:

1. The matriarch is Mamacita and we've known her for more than four years, since she was a kitten. There a great picture of her at the bottom of this May 2025 post. 

2. She's often seen with her older son Creamsicle, who is the cat we see most often. He hangs around in the mornings, sits in the firepit when he's trying to be sneaky and catch a bird and looks for shade on hot afternoons. 

3. Splash is a black-and-white tuxedo cat and is Creamsicle's younger brother. The two brothers often come for breakfast together in the mornings. Splash, as I'm sure I've noted before, got his name because, when he was a kitten, he fell into the pool and did tiny paddles all the way to safety before I could even get into the water to save him, which I would have.

4. Blue-eyed Gumball has been coming around for almost two years. I think he was an abandoned or lost pet. He often spends the entire day sleeping in a chair underneath the patio roof. Temptations are his favorite food, and I usually have to distract him with Temptations and a stern look when I'm feeding other cats, because he likes to chase them.

5. Meowmix starting visiting around the same time as Gumball, and the two of them get along relatively well together, especially given that they're both tomcats, so I wonder sometimes if they were essentially abandoned together. Meowmix is much more mellow and always runs off after he's finished eating. He's a sweetheart and is the only feral cat, currently, that lets me pet them.

6. Marmalade first started visiting in December, as I noted in the Christmas post, and he's yet another tomcat. And yet another cat that I suspect may have been abandoned or lost. He's extremely not neutered and loves to spray, spray, spray. He has designs on Mamacita, because he's incapable of understanding that she's spayed. I have great hopes that we can TNR at least two of Marmalade, Gumball and Meowmix this month, before the summer weather really kicks. Of course we want to get all three of them neutered, eventually, but these things take time, patience and energy. Marmalade has lost weight since December, which further reinforces the notion that he may not have always been an outdoor cat and is now fending for himself. And so I worry about him, especially, with his first summer coming. Here are two photos of Marmalade in our front window well.

7. And our newest and final semi-regular is Yinzer (named by Joan). I'm fairly sure it's a male. He may be the youngest of the cats, and once again, grrrr, I think there's a decent chance that he was abandoned/lost. He started coming by tentatively and then running off as soon as I went outside. Then he would meow at the back door a couple times before scooting off. Now he stays and eats some food some mornings, which makes me happy. Here he is...

* * *

We had some special cat visitors at the beginning of the year. A new-to-us pregnant female began coming nightly shortly after dark for food and especially for cheese. It got to the point where she would scoot under the table and wait while I put food down for her, but otherwise she was extremely skittish, as a pregnant kitty should be. We watched her get really big as she came for a few weeks and then, unsurprisingly, she stopped coming. I suspect we were her secondary/supplementary food source during pregnancy, so I'm honestly not sure if/when we'll see her again if she lives a fair distance away. We'll worry for her and her kittens and be here to help if they ever return. We named her Daisy and, yes, she has a heck of a R.B.F. Life in the desert is tough for the mama cats.

And Daisy came with a surprise! On three nights and three nights only, she was accompanied by a male tomcat that we realized was the long-lost Fjord Nubbins. Fjord is a son of Mamacita and is Creamsicle's brother from the same litter. He disappeared a couple years ago, before we could TNR him, and we had just assumed the worst. But it appears that he's thriving. In my head canon, he's Daisy's mate and, when she was pregnant and needed food, he remembered this place and led her here, accompanying her a few times to say hello. I could be completely wrong, but I like that story and I'm sticking with it. I could only get snapshots of Fjord, and his very recognizable face, through the window. Here they are: 

Meanwhile, we still have occasional skunks but I can't tell who's who anymore after naming most of them last year. Given the time of year, I suspect that we might not be far from the time when we start seeing some tiny, adorable baby skunks. 

We also seem to have overnight raccoon(s), given the levels of mayhem I find sometimes in the morning. I'm glad we're helping them, but they're hitting the cat food budget pretty hard. (I could just stop leaving out food overnight, but I always imagine that the most skittish and vulnerable cats, ones I never see, depend upon it, so I'll keep doing it.) 

If you're interested in helping in a small way to feed the feral kitties and skunks, my Redbubble page offers a lot of postcards of these cats (both the indoor pets and the ferals) posing in adorable fashion.

Cat photo memories from 2020

In the COVID-19 summer of 2020, I tweeted this out with the caption "a Bergman film, but with cats." Someone wittily replied that it could be Purrsona. I have long since deleted my Twitter/X account, for obvious reasons. But I still have a record of this tweet because I printed it out and tucked it away inside a Roger Ebert film review book.

Titan, in the front, passed away in 2024. But Mr. Angelino (middle) and Monkey (back) are still with us as our two oldest kitty-cats. They are good boys.

Here's another photo of Monkey from that same year, when I documented all of my bookshelves in Shelfie 2020. My bookshelves have changed a good bit since then.

Christmas cats 2025

Merry Christmas! I didn't get around to all the Yuletide posts I wanted to do this month, because every day is endlessly busy and I fell out of my writing routine. But for Christmas Day I wanted to share photos of some of the indoor and outdoor cats here at the desert abode. (If you want to browse multitudes of past Christmas posts, start here.)

Above: These feral/community cat brothers are Creamsicle, left, and Splash. They're both a little under 3½ years old, with Creamsicle being the older one. Both sons of Mamacita. Both trapped and neutered quite a while ago. They spent part of Christmas Eve lounging and napping in our front window well.

Here's another of Creamsicle. He likes to playfully swat my hand when I'm feeding him and his mother cheese. We connected through the window last night. I've never really pet him but it's easy to imagine him being a decent indoor cat, in the vein of Bandit.

Brave Sir Oliver, son of Mamacita via her last litter, peeks out from underneath our Christmas tree.

There's nothing Christmasy in this recent photo of Lady Samantha Penguin, but I wanted to include her because she's such a pretty girl.

Big Boi, father and/or grandfather of nearly all things, stands near the Christmas tree. He's either waiting for treats or waiting for me to go sit on the sofa and watch a movie so that he can get many pets and then doze off. 

Venus — son of Cirque, grandson of Mamacita and nephew of Creamsicle — is our only indoor cat that won't let me pet him. But he sure loves me when it's time for food and treats. 

Mommy Orange (left), mother or aunt of many of our indoor kitties, sits in a cat bed with her daughter Nebula. They are often inseparable nap partners.

Pete loves hanging out underneath the Christmas tree. She spends most of her day with her sister IceBear.

Marmalade is our newest outdoor feral/community cat. He's not neutered and his presence appears to have upset the outdoor cat ecosystem and pecking order, which is a bummer. Looking at him, it's hard not to think he's got some of Big Boi's DNA somewhere in his ancestral line.

Finally, the skunks haven't been coming as frequently, or in as great of a volume, as they did during the summer. But this fellow made a Christmas Eve visit last night. It might be Double Dot or Em Dash, but I don't see them often enough to know for sure anymore. I gave him a couple pieces of homemade Christmas cookie and he gobbled them up.

Oliver gets into the Halloween spirit

I walked away from my computer for just a couple minutes and Oliver (son of Mamacita) managed to (1) step on the exact right keys to open a spooky illustration and then (2) lay down on the keyboard in a very photogenic way that highlighted himself and the skull he summoned. Full credit to Joan for snapping the photo when they spotted him.

Oliver knows how to get into the Halloween spirit! The illustration on the screen is "All Is Vanity," a minorly famous piece of artwork done by Charles Allan Gilbert in 1892. Here's the full illustration:

As Wikipedia notes: "The drawing employs a double image (or visual pun) in which the scene of a woman admiring herself in a mirror of her vanity table, when viewed from a distance, appears to be a human skull. The title is also a pun, as this type of dressing-table is also known as a vanity."

In the 1974 horror movie The House on Skull Mountain, director Ron Honthaner paid homage to the illustration with this creative shot: 

Michael Betancourt wrote a fascinating, in-depth analysis of the shot for Bright Lights Film Journal in 2013, delving into how the shot in the film is a reversal of the illustration and how that applies to the movie's racial subtext. The movie itself is not great, but Betancourt's piece is absolutely worth a read.

Hans Holzer's "The Spirits of '76"

It wouldn't be Halloween and Spooktober without at least one Hans Holzer book. See the bottom of today's post for a directory of Papergreat's past Holzer posts...

• Title: The Spirits of '76
• Subtitle: "A Psychic Inquiry into the American Revolution"
• Author: Hans Holzer (1920-2009)
• Publisher: The Bobbs-Merrill Company
• Publication date: 1976, to tie in with the bicentennial
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 177
• Dust jacket designer: Ingrid Beckman
• Dust jacket price: $7.95 (via other sources, as mine is price-clipped)
• 
  Chapter titles: The Peace Conference That Failed; Charlottesville and the Revolution; Michie Tavern, Jefferson, and the Boys; A Visit with the Spirited Jefferson; A Revolutionary Corollary: Patrick Henry, Nathan Hale, et al.; The Philipsburg Manor Ghost; Major André and the Question of Loyalty; Benedict Arnold's Friend; The Haverstraw Ferry Case; A Visit to Oley Forge; and The Lady from Long Island.
• First sentence: In this age of peace conferences that go on for years and years without yielding tangible results — or, if any, only piecemeal ones, reached after long deliberation — it is a refreshing thought to remember that a peace conference held on Staten Island between Lord Howe, the British commander in America, and a congressional committee consisting of Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Edward Rutledge lasted but a single day — September 11, 1776.
• Excerpt from the middle #1: Perhaps General Edward Hand is not as well known as a hero of the American Revolution as others are, but to the people of the Pennsylvania Dutch country he is an important figure, even though he was of Irish origin rather than German.¹
• Excerpt from the middle #2: Even though Ethel would normally be quite tired after a trance session, I decided to have a look at the second story and the attic. Ethel saw a number of people in the upper part of the house, both presences and psychometric impressions from the past.
• Excerpt from the middle #3: All of a sudden he saw a heavy iron saw fly up into the air on its own volition.
• Contemporary mention #1: In a July 5, 1976, Time magazine article headlined "The Voices of ’76: A Readers’ Guide to the Revolution," Timothy Foote mentions in passing: "This month a parapsychologist and ghostwriter named Hans Holzer (Haunted Hollywood, The Phantoms of Dixie) is bringing forth a new ectoplasmic epic full of patriots and poltergeists called — what else? — The Spirits of 76."
• Contemporary mention #2: A short review of Holzer's book by Paul Dellinger in the October 3, 1976, edition of The Roanoke Times is scathingly headlined "Best Thing Is Title." It goes on to state: "The best thing about this book is its rather clever title. If the ghosts interviewed by the various mediums used by author Holzer in this series of seances are any indication, spooks must be a rather dull and confused lot."
• Contemporary mention #3: In a July 4, 1976, review for the Jackson (Tennessee) Sun, Phyllis Shelton writes: "A 'psychic inquiry into the American Revolution' is an interesting idea for a book. This is what Hans Holzer has attempted in The Spirits of '76. The book is somewhat like Tennyson's account of the jousts between knights in 'La Morte d'Arthur.'² The same thing happens over and over again, almost word for word. The only differences are the names of the antagonists. The accounts of hauntings are almost identical with only the locations of the inquiries and the mediums accompanying Holzer differing. The book may have a mild and passing vogue for ardent ghost story fanciers. Others may intend to take it even more lightly since 'methinks the gentleman doth protest too much.'" 
• Contemporary mention #4: Finally, let's just take the word of Phyllis C. Irshay who, in her short review for the June 19, 1976, edition of the Redlands (California) Daily Facts, concludes: "Read it for entertainment."

Special unrelated birthday wishes

Today, Orange (our indoor, formerly feral mama cat) and her sister, Mamacita (still an outdoor feral cat) turn 4 years old, by our reckoning. We first met them in December 2021, when they were just kittens of long-gone Mama and now-indoors Big Boi. I'd like to bring Mamacita inside some day to live alongside her sister, because the desert summers have put a lot of wear on her. But she'll still bonded to her dorky son Creamsicle, who I don't think would be happy without her.

Above: Orange (left) and Mamacita this morning

Above: Creamsicle (left) and his mother Mamacita with an afternoon snack 

of tuna and cheese, for Mamacita's birthday

  Previous posts about Hans Holzer books

• The Witchcraft Report
• The Psychic World of Plants
• Window to the Past: Exploring History Through ESP
• Charismatics
• The Psychic World of Bishop Pike
• The Vegetarian Way of Life
• Ghosts of the Golden West
• How to Cope with Problems

Footnotes

1. Hand was also an enslaver, as detailed responsibly by Historic Rock Ford.

2. This is a little confusing, because Le Morte d'Arthur is by Thomas Malory, not Alfred Tennyson.

Saboteur (1942, Alfred Hitchcock)

(Apologies to Norman Lloyd)

(P.S.: Spice is 110% fine. She's standing on a shelf.)

Phantom has a new home & I've named a skunk Pinky

Our Household Cat Inventory was reduced by one yesterday when Phantom (above) went to live with a very nice area man who was looking for a sweet companion cat. It should be a perfect fit. Phantom loves getting lots of attention from humans, but tended to get bullied by some of the other cats, especially her brother (half-brother?) Bandit.

Phantom got to take her favorite bed with her (plus toys and treats) to her new forever home and got herself all set for the short road trip before it was even time to leave. 

She's a good girl and I'll miss her. She was part of Orange's litter that was born in our house on June 28, 2022. Growing up, she and her sister Pengin lived in Spokane for awhile before rejoining our family here. (That might be why she was bullied. And/or I suspect that she and Pengin – who also got picked on – were seen as "different" because they possibly have a different father than their litter mates.¹ Though probably the same grandfather. It's complicated.)

Meanwhile, our "baby" skunks that I mentioned exactly one month ago are continuing to thrive. They aren't really babies anymore. Definitely juveniles. There are four of them, and we still have some nights when all four visit. But more typically it's just a couple of them, including the one who is somewhat tame and fond of me. Going against Wildlife Wisdom, I did pet this skunk gently a few times while it was occupied with eating. But I will be smart moving forward and fully cease this practice. It's a bad example, it can make the skunk too tame (endangering it in other situations) and, most importantly, rabies is bad, bad news.

Still, I figure it's OK to name this skunk. I went with Pinky, because I've started to distinguish the different markings on their backs. One has a big black stripe in the middle of the white on the back. One has two small black spots in the middle of the white. And Pinky has an all-white back except for a tiny bare spot where his/her pink skin shows through. Thus, Pinky. Is good skunk.

Footnote

1. Today's Word of the Day, kiddos, is superfecundation.

Sunday evening ramblings

Blargh. Between the national news, the desert heat, the prospect of returning to work in the morning, taking care of the cats and did I mention the national news, my mind is all over the place this afternoon and evening.

I missed my normal window of putting together a coherent blog post this morning, partly because the Phillies-Nationals game started at 8:35 a.m., Arizona time.

I'm behind on posting as it is. I do have a lot of good starter ideas stacking up in Blogger's "Unpublished" queue. It's just time that I need. Don't we all? 

Anyway, here's a miscellaneous collection of stuff that's been on my radar and won't be in a separate post:

1. I made a cryptic reference to Orson Welles last Sunday, but I no longer have the energy or desire to do that as a separate post. I was going to write about how Ash and I watched the ridiculous 1981 "documentary" (it really shouldn't be called that) The Man Who Saw Tomorrow, in which narrator Welles shares the prophecies of Nostradamus, as badly interpreted by Erika Cheetham. 

Skip it and watch F for Fake if you're looking for something involving Welles pulling one over on the public. I stand by what I wrote about The Man Who Saw Tomorrow in 2018: "The supernatural-seeming angle and the fiery, horrifying visions of the future offered by the film ... preyed on both Cold War fears of nuclear annihilation and racist anti-Arab sentiment. It cast "The Middle East" as some strange land from which a devilish villain would start the gears of World War III into motion in the 1990s." That is not an endorsement.

Further reading: Reddit and Jedadiah Leland on the Through the Shattered Lens website.

2. RIP, Terence Stamp. My official favorite movies of his are The Limey, Spirits of the Dead and Superman II. But my secret favorite movie of his is the absolutely bonkers Modesty Blaise (1966), where he saves the world alongside Monica Vitti. 

3. Want to help a New York City bookstore, spread the availability of books and contribute in a small way to the ideas of social justice? There's a summer book drive for Bluestockings Cooperative, a bookstore located at 116 Suffolk Street in New York. They're seeking new and gently used books on the topics of race, gender, sexuality, class, socialism, anarchism and more. The book drive continues through Sept. 1. For me, it was a very positive way to chip away, once again, at Resimplify Me and clear some shelf space. Here's the poster. 

4. Speaking of books, this amazing dust jacket cover showed up in my BlueSky feed recently. Adventures with Phantoms, by British ghost hunter Robert Thurston Hopkins (1884-1958), was published in 1946. I hadn't heard of this one before, so I'll have to keep my eyes peeled. It would look dandy alongside the likes of Haunted England and A Ghost Hunter's Game Book.

5. That's all for now, folks.

Pamela & James Mason's 1949 cat book

Here's a rare book, The Cats in Our Lives, that I'd love to stumble across in an independent used bookstore someday. In 1949, famed actor James Mason (1909-1984) and his then-wife Pamela Mason (1916-1996, born Pamela Helen Ostrer and also known as Pamela Kellino), who was an actress, author and screenwriter, wrote about their many cats. James Mason illustrated the volume.

They were unabashed cat lovers, as detailed in this 2014 post on the Cinema Cats blog, which is still going strong and is well worth your time!

“We are just people who keeps cats, that’s all,” James Mason told columnist Earl Wilson in 1950, according to Cinema Cats.

We resemble that statement.

Here are some online reviews of The Cats in Our Lives:

• "Mason writes just as you would have expected to — easy to hear his speaking voice and slight smile as you read, and Pamela was fun to get to know as well. Their experiences were manifold and interesting. Tragedy and fun go hand in hand with pet ownership over a period of years and the Masons had more than their share of both all through the war and the last years of the 40s decade, traveling on train and steamship all over England and America while keeping up with their deeply loved cats." (Allan, on Goodreads in 2008)
• "The book itself is fun, and it was written during the early years of Mason's marriage to Pamela Kellino when they were young and happy, so it's a very light-hearted book and it's nice to see Mason's sense of humor. His illustrations are, as all of his drawings are, very sweet and stylized." (Kathleen on Amazon in 2013)
• "In some ways, James was more revealing of his personality and character in this book than in the autobiography he wrote many years later. He and Pamela take turns writing the various chapters and you soon get a great insight as to what life was like during WWII in England and how very differently cats were treated in those days. They also wrote about non-cat topics. James discussion of raising chickens during the war in order to provide eggs for himself and his neighbors is very charming and down to earth." (Meezer on Amazon in 2010)

The Masons' cats included Toy Boy, Tribute, Whitney Thompson and Lady Augusta Leeds. (We have a Lady Samantha Penguin, who has many other names too.) You can read a little more about The Cats in Our Lives and see some of James Mason's illustrations in this 2016 piece by Sadie Stein for The Paris Review.

Bonus: Some recent cat photos

from our household 

(maybe I should write book)

From top: Venus, Orange and Dusty

Big Boi (left) and his son Bandit in the sunbeams

Venus, looking very photogenic, with Joan's artwork behind him. 

(This is roughly as close as I'm ever allowed to get to Venus.)

Unofficial family member Mamacita, a neighborhood feral we've known since December 2021. She's the mother or grandmother of several of our indoor cats. She's spayed now (hence the tipped ear). Her feral son Creamsicle takes good care of her. She likes cheese.