Room 8

Room 8 (c. 1947 – August 13, 1968) was a neighborhood cat who wandered into a classroom in 1952 at Elysian Heights Elementary School in Echo Park, California. He lived in the school during the school year and then disappeared for the summer, returning when classes started again. This pattern continued without interruption until the mid-1960s.^[1]

In the 1960s Room 8 became world famous and news cameras broadcast his return to school each fall. He received as many as 100 letters a day with some addressed simply to "The Cat. Los Angeles". Room 8 still enjoyed sleeping on desks as always and being read books by students.^[2] Student "secretaries" ensured helped students reply to the mail.^[3][4]

Eventually a woman revealed that Room 8 had likely been hers originally, until a boarder threw rocks at him and chased him away.^[2] Room 8 was featured in a documentary called Big Cat, Little Cat and a children's book, A Cat Called Room 8. Look magazine ran a three-page Room 8 feature by photographer Richard Hewett in November 1962, titled "Room 8: The School Cat". Leo Kottke wrote an instrumental called "Room 8" that was included in his 1971 album, Mudlark.^[1]

As he got older, Room 8 was injured in a cat fight and suffered from feline pneumonia. A family near the school volunteered to take him in, and when he could no longer walk long distances, the school janitor carried him across the street every day after school.

Room 8 died in 1968 after attending school for 15 years, longer than most humans.^[5] His obituary in the Los Angeles Times rivaled that of major political figures, running three columns with a photograph. The cat was so famous that his obituary ran in papers as far away as Hartford, Connecticut. The students raised the funds for his gravestone.^[1] He is buried at the Los Angeles Pet Memorial Park in Calabasas, California. The cat's fans held a campaign to put him on a U.S. stamp.^[6]

Elysian Heights Elementary School has a wall mural on the outside of the school that features Room 8, and the teachers read his book to each new class. Room 8's paw prints are immortalized in cement on the sidewalk outside the school.

In 1972, a cat shelter was started in his name called The Room 8 Memorial Foundation.^[7]

In 2024, a feature documentary film about the cat's life, Room 8, was made by film-maker Scott Mabbutt.

• List of individual cats
• List of wild animals from Los Angeles

• Virginia Finley, Finley; Mason, Beverly (1966). A Cat Called Room 8. Illustrated by Valerie Martin. G. P. Putnam's Sons. ISBN 0-399-60085-X. LCCN 66-14332.

• Scott Mabbutt (2024). Friends of Room 8: Remembrances of a School Cat. Independently published. ISBN 979-8339652359.

• Room 8 Cats Memorial Foundation
• Room 8 memorial page of Elysian Heights Elementary School
• Room 8 at Purr 'n Furr Famous Felines
• Room 8 at The Great Cat.org
• City of Echo Park
• Los Angeles Times August 14, 1968, Section C, Page 1
• The Hartford Courant August 1968