As LAO Chicken Corner regularly reminds us, we, Echo Park residents, are very serious about our pets, past and present. Roger Vargo of Explore Historic California will present a multimedia lecture on the Room 8 cat of Echo Park's Elysian Heights Elementary School fame at the Echo Park branch of the Los Angeles Library on Saturday, November 8 at 2 pm.

A personal connection triggered Mr. Vargo's interest in this topic. "I'm proud to say I was a student at Elysian Heights and knew Room 8. Room 8 was the most famous cat in Los Angeles," Roger once told an interviewer, "[the cat] lived at Elysian Heights School in Echo Park from 1952 until his death in 1968. He was the subject of a biographic book, appeared in LOOK Magazine and was in newspapers, radio and TV numerous times. Beverly Mason, the principal of Elysian Heights, was the cat's biographer, benefactor and protector."

The cat's legacy has even reached into the Internet age. There's a Room 8 Cat blog but what we really need is a Room 8 Cat Twitter feed. I can just imagine the Tweets:

"Mrs. O'Mara's class just went out to recess. What a relief. Those kids are driving me bonkers"

"The parakeet in Room 2 told the hamster in Room 4 who told me, during an intense interrogation, that FBI agents paid a visit to a teacher with questions about the Communist activities of a student's parents."

"Wait, was that an earthquake?"

The Twitterverse is full of non human Twitterers. At Ecce Homeroom, I twitter the musings of a wry hamster living la vida loco as an adopted pet of Mrs. Ochoa's 1st grade class at an elementary school on Mount Washington.

Perhaps my Ecce Hamster's next Twitter follower will be Room 8 Cat.