Healed

This is Part Two of the “Nine Lives?” story that ran in the June 12, 2025 edition of the Coastal Breeze News.

During his yearlong recovery from a life-threatening truck accident, 84-year-old Peter Sottong was being cared for by his wife Melida, who was by his side the entire way. Sottong was unable to perform his part-time job at the Marco Y or participate in the family business of creating Calusa Indian replicas, including the famous Key Marco Cat. Finally one day this spring, Melida decided that it was time for her husband to go back to work.

"Melida finally got to the point where she said, ‘Are you ready to go back to work?’ Sottong said. "And I said, ‘Well, I think so.' She said, ‘Good.’”

Sottong’s wife’s nudge to go back to work has been a Godsend to many. The staff and members at the Marco Y are beyond delighted to have him back doing his duties as operations manager. So are collectors of the Calusa replicas that he creates hand-in-hand with his wife.

“I do the finishing,” Sottong said, “and she makes the bodies. So, it works out good.”

“I do the all the pours,” Melida said, “and he does all the fancy stuff."

Sounds easy enough…but it’s certainly not.

The “pours” involve filling the various molds that the couple painstakingly created with a product called hydrocal. “It’s kind of like Plaster of Paris,” Sottong said, "but it's stronger, more durable.”

Each Calusa replica starts with Sottong creating a wood carving of the original artifact (he’s carved 30 Calusa replicas in all). Carving is a skill Sottong learned in his native New York some 35 years ago.

"I went to a guy who knew a lot about carving,” Sottong said, "and I said, 'I'd like to learn how to carve duck decoys.’ He taught me how to do it.”

Soon Sottong, who has always been handy, was obsessed with wood carving.

"Even though I didn't know much,” Sottong said, "I learned from other people. Every time a new duck would come by the front of the house, I'd look it up and I'd carve it. When we came down here, I said, ‘I've gotta do something besides a duck.' That's kind of how I got into this Key Marco Cat thing. Because over off of Bald Eagle, they used to have a little tiny historical display in a realtor's office. It was a very modest little display. And there was a fellow who had lived here, I guess, and he had carved some masks and some other things in there. Bill and Betty Perdichizzi were heading up the fundraising for the historical society at that time. They had the plot of ground, but they didn't have a building for the museum. So, I went home and carved a mask and I took it over to Bill and I said, ‘If I carve these, do you think you could sell them for your fundraiser?' He said, ‘Yeah, we could do that. But what we'd really like is a cat.' I didn't know anything about the cat at that time. There was a guy who carved the cat, but he had passed away. So, I thought, well, gee, this might be the start of something. And that's how I kind of got into the whole thing. Every time we put them in the gift shops, we'd have a sale. Of course, once the Marco Island Historical Museum got built, and their gift store opened, that's really how the volume got high.”

The original artifacts are part of the famous Frank Hamilton Cushing archeological dig at the north end of Marco Island in 1895, known as the Pepper-Hearst expedition. Over 1,000 wooden artifacts were discovered, including the Key Marco Cat, a six-inch half-human, half-panther wooden figure. Sottong uses illustrations by Wells Sawyer, an American painter, illustrator, and photographer who was part of the Pepper-Hearst Expedition.

“He was not only the photographer,” Sottong said, "but he was a watercolorist. We've got a lot of art from him. Those are the colors that we use for my work. I try to make it look as much like Sawyer as I can.”

Sottong also benefited from having the precise measurements of the original artifacts.

Sottong knew he was on the right path when he received a compliment from Bill Marquardt, an archeologist and professor at the University of Florida who specializes in the ancient cultures and environments of South Florida. Marquardt has focused on the Calusa Indians since 1983.

“We had an art show up at the Randell Research Center years ago,” Melida said. "And we were selling replicas. Pete came over to me and he said, ‘Do you see the man looking at my cat in the tent? That's Bill Marquardt. He's the world's leading expert on Calusa Indians.' Marquardt said to him, ‘Did you make this?' Pete said, ‘Yeah, I did.' And he said, ‘Best replica I ever saw. I'd like to invite you up to the to the school to take a tour of the stacks and see all of our artifacts."

Each replica starts with a wood carving by Sottong. Then Melida starts the mold-making process.

"To make a mold,” Sottong said, "she covers it with latex and we build up a certain thickness.”

The pliable latex mold is then inserted into a base before the hydrocal is poured. The base provides stability for the pour.

“The base is used to support it,” Sottong said. "Otherwise, it would just distort. If you didn't have a base, it would be distorted out of shape once you poured the heavy hydrocal in there. So, the base just supports it."

Sottong learned about mold making by asking questions.

"I talked to somebody because I didn't know a darned thing about it,” he said. "When I started making these molds, I had to pick people's brains. One of the guys that I talked to said you should consider using hydrocal. I actually put another additive in it to make it a little bit lighter. It's very strong, but it tends to be heavy. We've got a good recipe now. That's what we use for all of the replicas that we make. It took us a little while to get it right."

The Sottongs have the various molds organized on shelves and tables in their garage; all are identified with numbers and letters. There are multiple molds for the Key Marco Cat.

“These are all the molds for the cats,” Sottong said, gesturing toward a long line of identical bases. "When they come out of the mold, they're kind of rough. There's a lot of trimming to do. You have to finish it off. And I do that by hand so that each one gets a nice, smooth finish. If there’s a spot on it, I can make it right. It's not an automated process by any stretch of the imagination.”

Sottong carefully removes a full mold from its base and removes a pristine Key Marco Cat statue from the latex mold. There’s an air of excitement each time a replica is removed from the mold. As Sottong holds the pure white cat statue in his hand for the first time, inspecting it for any flaws, he looks up at his wife with an approving glance. Success!

Various things can go wrong on a pour. Maybe an air bubble that was not worked out of the hydrocal. Or perhaps a broken ear on a cat, or a damaged beak on a pelican mold.

"That's always fun when they come out good,” Sottong said.

“It feels like crap when they don't,” Melita said.

Under their workbench sits a box with 18 perfect white Key Marco Cat statues. A dozen painted cats sit on a workbench, ready to ship.

“I'm very happy with these,” he said of the newly poured cats.

"Aren't they pretty?” Melida said. "So beautiful. Well, you should see them when they're finished."

"The cat is the one everybody wants when they go to the store,” Sottong said. “This is a batch of cats that's currently underway. I put on two coats. This is a coat of paint here, and then I cover it with a stain. When I get done, the idea is to try to get it to look as much like wood as possible."

Sottong said they have added new relics to their lineup over the years.

"We just started expanding it,” he said. "We had one or two of the popular ones, and then we just kept making more and more and more. That's kind of how we did it."

Though Sottong tries to duplicate Sawyer’s colors, he said he doesn’t feel any real connection to the artist.

"I don't feel a connection with Wells Sawyer because he was a very talented, knowledgeable person,” Sottong said modestly. "But when I sit there and I do my painting, I guess you could say I really appreciate the art that the Indians put into these things. You know, when you look at these designs that they did, I sit here and say these guys were pretty creative and talented people. They were doing these things with sharpened shark's teeth and crude tools and God knows what kind of dyes and stuff they had to use. I guess I just feel appreciation for how they did it. I find it remarkable. I've come to appreciate in my little cursory association with the art that they produced, which I think is, in many cases, quite remarkable. A lot of people have said they think this is very reminiscent of the Egyptian statues of cats. They used a lot of cats, I guess, over there. You know, there's a lot of art behind this thing."

Though the Key Marco Cat is the people’s choice, it’s not necessarily Sottong’s favorite relic.

"I think some of the masks are my favorite,” Sottong said. “We're so used to looking at the cat. But you know what? What I did with the cat was I tried very hard to come up with a process that the finish would look exactly the same. We've got the carving down, so that the carving is a pretty good replica. But I wanted to make the finish as good as I could. And so that was the big challenge with the cat.”

A large poster of the Key Marco Cat hangs on a cupboard door in the garage.

“It gives me inspiration,” he said.

"It is a beautiful poster,” Melida agrees.

So far, Sottong has created 2,260 Key Marco Cats. Each one is signed and numbered before it leaves the shop.

“Some people say to me, ‘Don't you get bored painting the same thing over and over and over?’ Well, I find it a challenge to try to make every one look authentic. The more detail I have to go into, the more I appreciate what's behind it in terms of the talent of the people that invented this stuff.”

The gift shop at the Marco Island Historical Museum sells a lot of Sottong’s replicas. He also sells through his website, www.keymarcocat.com.

"It's been a good relationship over there,” he said of the Marco museum.

"We wholesale them to some of the other museums,” Melida said. "A research center up on Pine Island, they're big on it.”

Sadly, the Sottongs realize that they won’t be able to create these replicas forever. And they wonder if someone else will take up the torch.

“You know it's fun,” Melida said. "We do it together and make a little money. We can keep doing this for a while. But even this will stop at some point. I don't know what the museums will do."

"Somebody will want to do it I'm sure,” Sottong reasons.

"I don't think so, Pete,” Melida said. "I don't think so."

“The problem is,” Sottong said, "it's not a business where you're going to make a million bucks. You cover your costs and then you get a little bit more on top of it. But it's pretty modest. And we do it because we love to do it, and we like the people and all the rest of it."

Perhaps that makes Sottong’s replicas even more special.

“It was funny,” Melida said, "when he had his accident and he was in the hospital, I never got one order online. Not one order. We get orders through our website all the time. So that was like nine months that I never got one order. And the third day he was home, I got an order. It was very odd."

Though he downplays his own artistry, Sottong is obviously quite a wonderful artist.

“Yeah,” Merida said, "he's a wonderful guy, too."