Bold effort to rescue cat in tree results in feline tragedy

If you ever wonder why many fire companies no longer respond to calls to remove cats from trees, here's your answer.

A Georgetown resident spotted a strange cat in a tree and called the Bart Fire Company, according to Yonie Esh, Georgetown correspondent for an Old Order Amish newspaper.

Bart is the company that so ably coordinated events in the area following the deadly shootings at nearby West Nickel Mines School last October.

Esh reports in Die Botschaft's June 4 edition that Bart firefighters turned a hose on the cat in an effort to drive it down. Instead, the animal scampered farther up the tree, beyond reach of the fire company ladder.

So Bart called the Quarryville Fire Company, which provided a larger ladder truck. Two firefighters went up in the ladder bucket and grabbed the cat.

"While coming down, this poor cat probably got the idea she is being kidnapped!" Esh writes. "And didn't want no part of these two 'bad' men, so she bit the one guy hard through his glove!

"So the guy panicked and mistakenly strangled the poor cat!"

As the bucket descended, a small crowd of people waited expectantly for a successful conclusion to the affair.

But then they saw the firefighters look at each other and shake their heads.

When they reached the ground, the two men were not smiling.

"They had the poor cat," explains Esh, "but it was dead as last year's turkey!

"And then they had to go and get checked out for rabies!

"And nobody knew whose cat it was!

"Oh, my!"

And that is the strange story of a strange cat's strange demise in Bart Township.

Trapped in an outhouse hole
You think what happened to that cat was bad? Here's your worst nightmare.

You fall through an outhouse hole and sink. You scream and scream and scream. You keep slipping down in the slime. You fear you will drown.

But this is not a nightmare. This actually happened to someone in Manheim more than 70 years ago. Now the Rev. Robert M. Lamparter wonders who that someone is.

Lamparter, a retired Lutheran minister who lives in Lititz, knows that most outhouse stories tend to be humorous.

This outhouse story is not.

One summer in the early 1930s, when he was in his mid-teens, Lamparter attended an Antes family reunion in Manheim's Kauffman Park.

After the noon meal, he took a walk through the park.

"While walking, I heard the loud cries of a child," he recalls. "I stood still and listened. Where was this cry coming from? The outhouse!"

Lamparter ran to the privy and peered into one of its holes.

"Down there in all that human waste was a little boy slowly sinking deeper into it," he says. "I reached down as far as I could, grasped one of his little hands and pulled him up, took him outside and called for help."

The boy's mother eventually arrived and took him away.

"That was the end of the story for me," says Lamparter. "I never found out whose child he was."

As he grows older, Lamparter keeps revisiting this story.

"Did I save that little boy's life that day?" he wonders. "Whose child was he? Did he remember that episode in his life? Is he still living today?"

If, among The Scribbler's diverse and discriminating readership, there is a grown man who almost drowned in dung more than seven decades ago, Lamparter would like to know.

CONTACT US: jbrubaker@LNPnews.com or 291-8781