Another Life for Key Marco Cat

Marco Island Historical Society’s curator of collections Austin Bell is becoming a prolific author. And his favorite subject is a six-inch tall wooden carving that was discovered preserved in muck in 1896 by legendary anthropologist Frank Hamilton Cushing on a famous expedition to Marco Island.

Bell’s latest effort is a children’s book. Perhaps not ironically, Bell was experiencing the gift of bringing a child into the world while he was working on Lost and Found: The Adventures of Marco the Cat and its companion, the more scholarly effort, The Nine Lives of Florida’s Famous Key Marco Cat.

“While I was in the middle of writing that book,” Bell said, “my wife and I had our first kid. And one of the things we always want to focus on here at the museum is trying to find new ways to reach different audiences and especially children. I was getting a lot of practice reading children's literature at the time. So before my University Press book was even finished, I wrote the outline for the children's book. Chloe would have been a couple of months old and I guess it was just reading all those other rhyming children's books, you know, putting her to bed every night and stuff. I was like, you know, this would be a good way to kind of summarize what's in the more academic version for adults. But there's a basic outline of a story there that could be really shrunk down and sort of translated to younger children in particular. So that was sort of the inspiration, I guess, my daughter. I guess what it boils down to is that having my first child was really the inspiration for creating this book.”

Bell said that paring down years of research into an easy-to-understand children’s book was not child’s play.

"I'd never written a children's book before,” Bell said. "It was a lot different than writing the academic book. It was in some ways harder.”

Bell had to find a publisher and equally important, the right artist.

“It was just a different writing style,” Bell said. "I had to be able to communicate what my vision for the images were to the artist in a way that would translate well to children but still be based on historical facts and images. And so there was a lot of back and forth with the artist, Kayleigh Castle.”

"She actually lives up at Babcock Ranch,” Bell said. "I first saw Kayleigh's work at the Marco Island Center for the Arts. She had a little exhibition in the back room there years ago. And I just took her business card at the time because I liked her fun, whimsical style. I went back to it and I thought, this is exactly how I would want the cat, the Key Marco Cat and the other characters to look like. So eventually, we got in touch and started the process and she was just wonderful to work with. A lot of the images that she put down are kind of exactly—or better than what I had even envisioned.”

By the time all the dust settled and the Marco the Cat came to life, Chloe was three years old, perhaps the ideal age to be introduced to the cat that has been the object of her father’s affection for the past 10 years.

"I read the draft to her,” Bell recalls. "And then, of course, she got the first copy of the book when it came out. Every night she picks a book to read for bedtime. She has quite an extensive library, so it doesn't get picked every night, but it has been picked sometimes a few nights in a row, which is like a huge honor. And then we'll move on to some other book. Then maybe a month or two later she'll want to read it again. It's in the queue of her favorites.”

Of course, it pumps up her father every time she chooses to read the adventures of Marco the Cat.

“Yep,” Bell says proudly, "it does. She's gotten to kind of know the artifacts as characters when she comes to the museum, she gets excited to see them. And when we had our banners along Collier Boulevard, she recognized all the artifacts that became the characters in the book. So there was Bird and Wolf and Deer and Marco the Cat. She calls him by his name in the book. And so, yeah, I feel like she's definitely learning something even at the age of three. These are animals and part of the local identity here."

Bell said Chloe is excited to see the Key Marco Cat every time she visits the museum.

"She knows right where it is,” he said with a smile. "It's like, yeah, she looks forward to seeing that every time she comes in.”

Chloe thinks her dad’s the luckiest guy around, getting to play with the Key Marco artifacts every day at work.

"We talk about our days a lot of times before bedtime when she's trying to go to sleep, and she thinks that I take the artifacts out and play with them while I'm at work. Because at daycare, they take out toys, and that's what they do all day. They play with the stuff. And so she asked me if I take them out and play with them. And so I said, 'Well, some of them are very breakable. So we leave them in their boxes and cases.’”

Bell actually has handled the ancient Key Marco Cat—very carefully.

"With gloves, of course,” Bell said. "And not very high above the table because I don’t want to take any chances. We want it to go back completely unchanged as if it never left the Smithsonian.”

Both of Bell’s books can be purchased in the museum’s gift shop.