ARTWORK VIA IMAGEOF.NET WALLPAPER
Here's a tail of the bizarre from over 60 years ago that caught my attention: it stars a resourceful, intrepid "woman reporter," a well-scorched but improbably live Calico kitty, a brick kiln, a steak, and a sealskin hat.
Apparently, the stray, later named "Miracle," survived being locked into an industrial brick kiln that was heated to 920 degrees in a mind-boggling 36-hour ordeal - from a Friday night in March of 1950 when the kiln was fired up, until the following Sunday when it was unsealed. A newspaper woman covering the Minerva, Ohio town where it occurred, Twila Carman, wrote about the incident, and was roundly ridiculed for reporting such an "impossible" event.
In true Kate-Hepburn-as-feisty-news-gal fashion, Mrs. Carman devised her own test to prove the naysayers wrong, improvising a "synthetic cat" from a raw steak wrapped in a sealskin cap and submitting it to the trial by fire - the same conditions endured by Miracle. The result? "At the end of 36 hours, the steak still was juicy and hat fur soft ... One end was charred. That was the end farthest in the furnace, where the tail of the real cat presumably once lay. An inch and a half of Miracle's tail was burned off ... 'Now,' exclaimed the brick superintendent, as the test was concluded, 'maybe they'll believe we're not a bunch of liars.'"
You can see some of the archived articles reporting on the saga via this Google search. Sadly, I found no photos of Miracle, but reports indicate that she was recovering nicely, if perhaps none the wiser for her adventure: When returned to the Metropolitan Brick Company for a TV spot, "She hobbled direct to the door of the kiln, still hot from last week's tile-making. Oh, Miracle, you crazy asbestos-head!
If you have some doubt about how well Miracle actually survived such a trauma over the long term, as I did - she was still going strong two years later, and found a home with the brick company superintendent. Hellloooo? Hollywood? Cate Blanchett for the win on starring as Twila in the film version - you heard it here first!
