One life down, 8 lives to go for Sylvester

Marisa O’Neil

NEWPORT HEIGHTS-- Suffering succotash!

Sylvester the cat, a feline with an apparent predilection for

heights, caused quite a stir last weekend.

Like something straight out of the cat handbook, he went missing

then turned up a week later, 40 feet up a tree. And the morning of

March 26, a cast of neighbors, police, firefighters and a

tree-trimmer watched Sylvester’s saga unfold.

Janet Reuter and her family adopted the aptly-named

black-and-white cat from a local shelter in January and brought him

back to their Irvine Avenue home. Sylvester had big paws to fill,

since the Reuters had their previous cat for 15 years and waited

another two before they could bear getting another, Reuter said.

“He’s just the most friendly cat,” she said of Sylvester. “This

cat’s like a baby. He lies in your arms like a baby.”

He gave the Reuters an early scare, finding his way to a

neighbor’s roof shortly after settling in. A ladder and some TLC

helped get him down, Reuter said.

Then on March 16, Sylvester went out and didn’t come back.

Reuter posted fliers around the neighborhood, asking for his

return. She called Newport Beach Police to report Sylvester missing

and placed an ad in the Daily Pilot.

But she started losing hope.

“The second day, I was putting up posters and a woman pulled up

and said she’d lost her cat, too,” Reuter recounted. “She said: ‘We

think our cat was got by a coyote.’ So, she starts crying. I start

crying. We’re both just crying.”

Then on morning of March 26, animal control officer Valerie

Schomburg knocked on the Reuters’ door.

“She said: ‘I think we found your cat,’” Reuter recalled.

Turns out, a neighbor called police the night before to report

that she’d been hearing a cat crying for days, but didn’t know where

it was.

Animal control officer Bill Lyons checked it out, and sure enough,

a cat was stuck high in an overgrown pine tree.

“I shined my flashlight, and I see this little white face with

black on it,” Lyons said. “It must’ve been 40 feet up in the tree.”

But it was too dark and too late to do anything.

When Schomburg read Lyons’ report the next morning, she remembered

Sylvester and went to see Reuter.

Reuter and her 13-year-old son Parker rushed with Schomburg to the

tree in question -- less than a block away from their home.

“To think he was so close,” Reuter sighed, remembering the rescue.

Like a well-worn cliche, firefighters from Newport Beach showed

up. But they deemed the tree too overgrown and the cat too high to

effectively retrieve him.

They suggested the Reuters call out a tree trimmer.

A crowd began to gather. Everyone had an opinion.

“People said to put tuna out; he’d come down,” Reuter said. “The

firefighters said he’d come down. The tree guy said he’d trimmed

trees for 20 years and never found cat bones in one.”

Finally, after some haggling over the price, the tree trimmer

headed up the tree’s trunk. He later emerged from the branches with

Sylvester in a pillowcase.

Sylvester was a little dehydrated, but none the worse for wear,

Schomburg said.

Reuter invited everyone to her house to meet the now-infamous cat.

“He just came and purred right up against everyone,” she said. “No

one could believe it. They said: ‘No wonder you wanted him back so

badly.’”

Now Sylvester is doing just fine and is back to living his life of

leisure, with one minor change.

Sylvester’s got a curfew.

“I will never let him out at night again,” Reuter said.