The Cat’s Meow

Sam hangs over all our celebrations, including every Very Kitty Christmas

Sam the Siamese has hung in our family’s various bathrooms since the 1950s. He was painted by Fred Chance, who we think was a New York City ad man, according to the Google Machine. Photo: Author’s archives

Sam is a Siamese cat. Slender of build, with big, pointed brown and tan ears. He stares straight ahead — a sentinel in my upstairs bathroom.

This watercolor — streaked and smudged from so many perches above toilet tanks and bathtubs over the years, is a somewhat iconic part of my family’s lore. Daddy told me that Fred Chance, the man who painted it, was an “Ad Man” in Manhattan. I’ve always imagined a “Mad Men” kind of situation, with Mr. Chance in the John Hamm role, though more sensitive than that. But I have no idea if Mr. Chance was a friend of the family, or worked with Dad in New York, or was merely exhibiting his work at a local arts fair in rural Connecticut, where we lived at the time Sam first came to live with us in the 1950s.

I’ve looked Fred Chance up on Wikipedia, that bottomless source of information that’s often true, but sometimes not. There was a “Fred Chance” in Manhattan, first active in the advertising biz in the 1930s, who also did covers for Vogue, and who once had an exhibition at the Museum of Modern art on West 53rd Street. He was “active,” the Wiki page says, “in the field of illustration for over fifty years in Philadelphia and New York,” stating definitively that Mr. Chance “was still active in magazine cover work in…