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I have had as many as 14 cats at a time; currently, I have 10.While conventional wisdom seems to be that anyone who has cats that number in double digits automatically qualifies as a “crazy cat lady” (even if they’re a man), this story is not about me.*********************************************************************************************************************Late summer/early autumn 1984. I’m sitting at my desk in my office at Hughes Aircraft Company, working on revisions of material and process specifications.My office-mate and fellow technical writer, Shirley, comes back from a visit upstairs to the Component Specifications control-point. She has a grim expression on her face.”Did you hear about what happened to Mary Ann?” She asks me.Any time a conversation starts with “Did you hear what happened to…” and the person referred to is in their fifties or older, you fear that the details to come are going to be medical. Mary Ann, the Component Engineering document control point lady, was 56.Shirley saw the look on my face and reassured me, “No, no, she’s all right. It’s her cats.”Mary Ann was notorious, in a quiet sort of way, for her role in rescuing the feral cat colony at the old Hughes Culver City site.Like a lot of Hughes “old timers,” Mary Ann had started working at the Hughes Culver City site.The Culver City site was a big, rambling place. It was also the location of a very large feral cat colony.Mary Ann was among a legion of people who fed the cats in the colony and occasionally trapped and spayed/neutered members of the colony. It was a fairly stable situation; the cat population would grow a little and decline a little, but stayed within bounds where some people might complain occasionally, but mostly the cats stayed “below the radar.”That all changed in the early 1980’s when Hughes Aircraft Company was sold to General Motors, and the Culver City site, which was actually owned by Hughes Summa Corporation, was slated for development.Mary Ann and several other people who fed the cats formed a group with the objective of trapping the cats and finding homes for them. They had been very successful in finding homes for kittens and the younger feral adults, but some of the cats were hard-core feral older adults and weren’t interested in becoming pets.There were also cats that were feline leukemia-positive (FeLV+). FeLV+ cats are hard to find homes for; in addition to the medical problems they have, they can transmit the virus to other cats. This means people who already own a cat or cats won’t usually consider adopting a FeLV+ cat.Mary Ann was determined that none of these cats would be euthanized. It was inevitable that some of them ended up in the double-wide mobile home where she lived. She named them all and knew each as an individual, and she loved them. When they hurt, she hurt. When they were sick, she fought to make them well.After one of the FeLV+ cats she’d rescued died at the vet hospital while being spayed, she refused to take any more in for spaying/neutering. So the inevitable had happened: kittens.She was fiercely protective of those cats she’d kept. Mary Ann felt, with some justification, that she was all that stood between those cats and euthanasia, and she was ready to take on the world to keep them alive.Mary Ann didn’t have a college degree. She had been working at Hughes for more than 25 years; when she had hired in in the 1960’s, most women didn’t go to college, and they certainly didn’t go into what are now known as the STEM disciplines. She was smart, she learned quickly, and had a knack for organization.She had come up the “pink collar” route— secretarial/clerical/administrative positions, and her skills in organization and administration, as well as knowledge of the documentation system gained through experience, made her a natural for the control point position.Mary Ann was sharp and professional about her job. But she had a prickly personality that kept most people at arm’s length. Many of the women at Hughes who had started there in the 1950’s and 1960’s and came up through the ranks via the pink collar route were like that. Decades of working in a male-dominated field, without the protections against harassment or discrimination we have now, could be bruising to the sensibilities. And now there were younger women entering the workplace, with doors opening for them that had been slammed firmly shut when people like Mary Ann were trying to negotiate the career corridors— can you blame the older women for having some resentments?I had gotten to know Mary Ann because of the cats. I had six cats and she talked to me about her cats. The official story was that she was “fostering,” but she never spoke of the cats she shared her home with as anything other than her cats.My pre-vet background in animal science made her feel open to asking me questions about health issues her cats had. I learned that she was spending hundreds of dollars on a supplement for her FeLV+ cats. The major ingredient of the supplement was ascorbic acid, with some trace minerals and herbal extracts added. It was as close to “snake oil” as I’ve ever seen. I tried, tactfully, to dissuade her from spending money on it. I learned that Mary Ann also used supplemental oxygen to try to help her sickest cats, and I learned that she rotated between about half a dozen different vets with her cats to try to keep any one vet from getting the whole picture of how many cats she had and how she cared for them. And she’d “blacklisted” some vets who she felt had failed to treat her cats successfully or who had raised issues about how she cared for them.I gave her literature about FeLV+ cats and current treatments and had encouraged her to try to see vets as partners in caring for them rather than adversaries. I listened to her and tried to be helpful. She was spending a ton of money on sick FeLV+ cats.I knew she had more cats than I had, but I didn’t know how many.“What about Mary Ann’s cats?” I asked Shirley.Mary Ann had gone out with a friend for dinner and a movie. It was a warm evening; the double-wide mobile home Mary Ann lived in didn’t have air conditioning.When she stayed home, she kept the windows open to keep the mobile home cool and aired out. And she made sure cats stayed off the windowsills; the park she lived in had a limit of two cats per residence.When she was at work, she shut all the windows except a couple in the bathroom that were out of reach of her cats.That evening, she decided to leave a window in the living room open.She didn’t know the screen was loose. Evidently one of her cats pushed the screen out enough to get out. Other cats followed, and eventually the screen fell off.While Mary Ann and her friend were enjoying an evening at the movies, her cats spent the evening going in and out the window.More than thirty of them. Apparently it created quite a scene as they exited.The manager of the mobile home park was waiting on Mary Ann’s porch when she came home, and he was mad as hell.The park manager gave her an ultimatum: get rid of all except two of the cats, or sell her mobile home and move out.Mary Ann decided she would move. First she rounded up as many of the escaped cats as she could. I borrowed a trap from a friend and loaned that to her; she borrowed others from cat rescue organizations. And many of the strayed cats returned of their own accord. She spent nights hunting through the mobile home park, through the neighborhood around it, going out when it was quiet and calling the missing cats. She loved them all and grieved the loss of every one that she couldn’t find. I don’t know for sure how many she never found, but I know she got damn near all of them back. But it hurt her that she didn’t find all of them. I know that hurt her like hell: she never entirely got out of the search mode, trying to find the ones that were missing.As she found them, she had to foster them out. She asked me if I would take some in, but my husband was adamant: help her in other ways, but we weren’t taking in any of her cats.Mary Ann started house-hunting. My husband and I had bought our house that year, and I told her I would help her in any way I could with the process.To be able to afford a single-family detached house, Mary Ann had to go pretty far from the South Bay neighborhood where she lived.She found a housing development that was going up in Moreno Valley. She got to pick the lot where her house would be built. She got to pick some of the materials, the finishes, the details.The construction of her new house, which followed in detail, kept her looking forward; It was something she enjoyed, unlike the process of listing her mobile home for sale. That part wasn’t going well.“I cleaned my carpets EVERY WEEK,” she told me and my office-mate, Shirley. “My house DOES NOT ‘reek of cat piss.’” Mary Ann’s voice was shaking with anger.The listing agent for her mobile home had finally given Mary Ann an ultimatum: something had to be done. Whenever the agent brought a potential buyer to see the mobile home, the sale got killed the moment the agent opened the door for the would-be buyer. The smell of cat urine permeated the carpet, the walls, everything.Mary Ann had, at the agent’s insistence, had the old carpet stripped out and new carpet put in. There were no cats housed in the mobile home, but you still knew the moment you opened the door that many cats had lived there.The agent was refusing to show the mobile. Mary Ann was deeply hurt and resentful.The paperwork for the mortgage on her new house-to-be wasn’t causing any trouble. She’d filled it out and submitted it to the lender, and hadn’t heard a word from them. Literally not a word. Mary Ann thought this was a good thing.Shirley and I weren’t so sure. We’d each been through the home-buying process earlier in 1984. My husband and I bought a house, Shirley had bought a condo. We were each, like Mary Ann, first-time buyers with imperfect credit.It had seemed that every few days there was a mortgage-related issue that had to be dealt with: the lender required paycheck stubs. An employment history. We needed to explain the source of the down-payment. There was a problem with the credit report that had to be fixed. Constant calls from the mortgage broker that needed attention.Mary Ann hadn’t gotten a single call back from the lender after she filled out the paperwork. Not one call.Shirley and I tried, tactfully, to suggest that Mary Ann needed to call the lender.Mary Ann’s temper flared. The sale of her mobile home was going nowhere, and we were suggesting she upset the apple cart and start bothering someone about a process that was (apparently) going through without a hitch?Uhhhh….yes.Not a snowball’s chance in hell.Mary Ann was now driving out to Moreno Valley every weekend to see the progress on her house. It was nearing completion.Then the sales manager for the development called her: how was her mortgage application progressing?The mortgage broker who had been assigned Mary Ann’s application had abruptly quit, walked away from his job, a week after she put the paperwork in. Chaos had ensued as people went through the guy’s files and had tried to figure out what he was working on and applications for mortgages were re-assigned to other employees. Mary Ann’s application was found in a file with one other document: the credit report, which revealed that she had declared bankruptcy three years earlier and had a bunch of accounts with late payments.Since nobody had gotten any calls about the application in the weeks that had gone by, the assumption was made that Mary Ann was no longer interested in a mortgage.So: Mary Ann’s new house was ready for her to move in. But her mobile home wasn’t being shown for sale and her mortgage paperwork hadn’t even been started. The sales agent suggested that if she was still interested in a house, she should pick out a lot in the next phase of the development and start the process over. They’d sell “her” new house to somebody else.Mary Ann went into full freak-out panic mode. Sell HER house to someone else? After she’d picked out the lot, the floor plan, the finishing details, and had visited the site so many, many times to watch it progress? And her cats stay in fostering more weeks? She’d fight to keep that from happening!The sales manager gave her a month to get the mortgage and down payment.I helped her with the credit report. There were a bunch of late payments on accounts. I asked her which delinquent accounts had been paid in full, and we started by calling those creditors and asking them if they could please take the delinquency off the credit report since the account had been satisfied. We were able to get those delinquencies removed.The bankruptcy needed an explanation. Mary Ann told me that she had gotten in trouble over vet bills for her cats, which had caused her to start trying to juggle other bills to pay the vets. She had started getting calls from collection agents, first at home (she’d used an answering machine to screen the calls) and then at work (she couldn’t screen those). In desperation, she’d called an attorney who had billboards touting for clients with bill collection problems.She wanted to re-structure her debt, set up a schedule for repaying creditors that she could live with. The attorney steered her towards bankruptcy, painting a glowing picture of a “fresh start” with a “clean slate.” The bankruptcy would fall off her credit report after seven years. He was a lawyer, she said, and she trusted that his experience assured that bankruptcy was the best option for her.I wrote up the narrative for her, doing my best to shade it as favorably as possible. This would go to the lender along with the sanitized credit report.Meanwhile, one of the chemists at Hughes had a suggestion about the cat piss smell in her mobile home: there were companies that specialized in removing objectionable odors from houses that had had “problems.” These companies could eliminate smells like smoke from houses where there had been fires, or decomposition odors from houses where someone had died. Maybe they could deal with cat piss smell?Mary Ann called one of the companies. They came out and worked their magic. The agent who had been refusing to show the mobile home started bringing potential buyers again.Collectively, all of us who had helped Mary Ann crossed our fingers and prayed.Mary Ann’s jubilation when she got the call that her mortgage was being funded was sunshine after storms and darkness. And then she got an offer on her mobile home, which she accepted. All within the month the sales manager for the real estate development had specified. Maybe God really does watch out for fools and cat ladies!The mobile home’s buyer did a wire transfer of the funds, Mary Ann went to her sales agent’s office to sign the papers. It was done. Mary Ann authorized the further transfer of funds from the sale of her mobile home to the account for the purchase of her house. The mortgage was funded.She could move into her new house. Her cats could come home.The very next day, Mary Ann got a call from the mobile home sales agent.The person who had bought her mobile home had died from a massive heart attack.HOLY MOLY.But it didn’t matter. The sale had been completed.Someone, somewhere, was looking out for Mary Ann. No doubt about it.Mary Ann moved out to Moreno Valley, and about four years later, she retired from Hughes. She got all her cats back. I didn’t stay in touch, but I heard that after a few years she got in trouble over too many cats again, and ended up moving from Moreno Valley to somewhere “north,” where she had a relative (sister?) living.It’s easy to make cat ladies the butt of jokes and of stories where cat piss and dozens of distressed cats feature prominently. God knows I’ve found myself on the receiving end of crazy cat lady jokes; I’m okay with it, because I actually don’t fit the criteria for cat hoarder.Yes, animal hoarding is a thing and it’s recognized as a thing by the psychological/psychiatric community. The Tufts School of Veterinary Medicine has a research consortium devoted to the study of animal hoarding.This is their website, in case you’re interested:Hoarding of Animals Research Consortium - Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts UniversityExtracted from the website, these are the criteria that differentiate someone like me from a cat hoarder:Having more than the typical number of companion animals.Failing to provide even minimal standards of nutrition, sanitation, shelter, and veterinary care, with this neglect often resulting in illness and death from starvation, spread of infectious disease, and untreated injury or medical condition.Denial of the inability to provide this minimum care and the impact of that failure on the animals, the household, and human occupants of the dwelling.Persistence, despite this failure, in accumulating and controlling animals.While I’ll plead guilty to the first point, it’s a solid negative on all the others.Here’s the thing: I knew Mary Ann and her circumstances. She wasn’t a ridiculous or even a pathetic person. She was smart and capable.The need to love and be loved, to feel that somehow you’re a person who matters in life is one of the defining characteristics of human beings. We want to know and feel that to someone, something, somehow, our presence has been important and our life has meaning.In most of us, these needs fall into well-traveled and predictable paths: relationships with other people. Family. Perhaps marriage or partnership, perhaps children.Maybe for some of us, it’s work, or art, or caring for things like animals. Usually well-ordered and reasonable. We all reach for something that tells us we matter, we love, we’re loved. We need that.In animal hoarders, that need somehow goes wrong. I know Mary Ann loved her cats, I know she wasn’t stupid and she wasn’t a bad person.Maybe the reader can judge for themself what she’s like.You see, there’s a coda to this story. When I saw this question posted, I decided to write about Mary Ann. And on impulse, I googled her full name, Mary Ann Hudak, +cats. And this came up:Roseville woman, 87, found living in filthy home with nearly 100 catsIf you watch the video in the story the link takes you to, you can see Mary Ann.I contacted the reporter whose by-line is on the story. He responded that Mary Ann is still alive, she is in an assisted living situation and has three cats. She’s doing well. I’m making inquiries about where I can send her a memento of our Hughes Aircraft days.Maybe God really does look after cat ladies. I’d like to think so.

Typically, they’ll order a credit report and a criminal history report. They’ll also look at rental history, usually with an eviction report sometimes supplemented by actual calls to previous landlords.Some years ago, I had bought a manufactured home in a mobile/manufactured home park as an investment, a rental property. So, first they ran those checks on me. And I was clean. But they’d also have to run those checks on my tenants. (Although I would own the physical manufactured home, it was sitting on rented land. So I as the owner needed to be checked out, and so did anyone I rented to.)The park rejected at least three of my applicants before approving one. While they wouldn’t reveal the reason to me, several appeared to be credit issues but one likely was some sort of criminal history. Note: I knew my applicants probably would have some credit issues—heck, that’s why they were looking for an inexpensive manufactured house—my application did have a basic criminal history question, too. Park management, with a formal criminal history report, apparently found something significant. While I found those rejections frustrating—and it was costing me money not having the rental income—I understood the park management’s position.But eventually I found a nice family who’d run into financial problems and ended up with a foreclosure. Despite the foreclosure, the park approved their occupancy. I was selling the property as a lease-option. They paid on time, like clockwork. And while the option was set up to run seven years, at about year four the dad approached me and asked if I’d be willing to sell before the time period was up. I said “sure,” and he went ahead and bought the property. It was a happy ending all around.

I didn’t think I would answer this, but it’s not like I’ve been busy, so here goes:AboutWhite, upper middle-class male, private Catholic high school in upstate NY (75 kids in my grade), 6 siblings, pretty active in community, looking to major in engineering, CS, or political scienceStatsGPA - 102 weighted, 97 unweightedSAT - 1500 (Never sent)Subject Tests - 800 Math II, 780 BioACT - 36 compositeAPs - 5 on Calc AB, Bio, CS Principles, Lang & Comp, 4 on World & USECs- Created a mobile app for my school and am currently trying to upgrade our traditional hall-pass system to something from this century- Made an app for the Catholic Center at a local university- Worked at my church since 10th grade, setting up for services and such- Worked at a local theatre company doing lights and sound- Science Olympiad, theatre stuff at school, played golf, but nothing extraordinary in any of those- Various volunteer work at elementary schools- Won Amazon Future Engineer scholarship- Won Congressional App Challenge for my school’s appMy Common App essay was about my struggle with working for the Catholic Church as all of these new abuse allegations came out and how I had to rebuild my trust in them.—Schools (In the order I opened them)Duke (ED) - Deferred. This was tough. Duke was my top choice and I had definitely put all my eggs in this basket. Everyone I talked to was confident I would get in so I wasn’t really ready. I also found out on a school trip with all my friends under the Christmas tree at Bryant Park, so it wasn’t fun. I hadn’t written any other supplementals until I found out, so I don’t think they were great.U Alabama (Rolling) - Accepted. They offered a full scholarship to people with a 1600 SAT or a 36 ACT so I figured I’d apply just in case we couldn’t afford anywhere else.RIT (RD) - Accepted. Never really wanted to go here, but they offered me a free application and I know some people there, and it was nice to get in somewhere after Duke. Their financial aid wasn’t great, though.Binghamton University (RD) - Accepted. My parents went here so they encouraged me to apply. Too close to home, but it was a solid option. For being an in-state student though, it was still really expensive.Villanova (RD) - Accepted. This was the only other application I submitted before I found out about Duke, so it was pretty good. I didn’t apply to the engineering school here, though, because it didn’t look that great when I was on the tour.Boston College (RD) - Accepted. I was excited about this one. It was probably my second (realistic) choice after Duke, and they had pretty good financial aid.Georgetown (RD) - Waitlisted. Wasn’t really sure what to expect for this one. My interview went great (it was at a ski resort on New Years Eve) and everyone I talked to really liked it, plus I think my essay about working for the Catholic Church helped, so I was happy with the waitlist.Northeastern (RD) - Accepted. I really liked the city of Boston and their co-op program, so this was another solid option for me. Terrible financial aid, though.Duke (RD) - Accepted. This time, I really prepared myself to get rejected so this was a huge surprise and the best-case scenario. I think it had a lot to do with the letter I wrote to my admissions officer after I got deferred and mentioned a lot of things that had happened since my Common App (i.e. both the Amazon and Congressional App awards). Amazing financial aid, which was an awesome surprise, too.Columbia (RD) - Waitlisted. I was proud of my supplementals for this one. I wrote them right around the time Tessa Majors was killed and the university was being criticized for some of its response, so I talked about how I want to be like the students of Columbia who can take risks and even call out the university itself. It was definitely risky, but my philosophy was that if they didn’t like the criticism, I wouldn’t want to go there anyway.Yale (RD) - Waitlisted. Since I had gotten into Duke, I didn’t really mind this one, but I thought my interview went great. It was over two hours and we talked about everything from my interviewer being in one of Yale’s first co-ed classes to our love of Harry Potter.Stanford (RD) - Rejected. Honestly kind of relieved, because I wouldn’t need to choose between Duke and Stanford. I had wanted to go here for a long time before I realized how unlikely it probably was.NYU (RD) - Accepted. Very last-minute application, definitely should have done more research on the engineering school (it’s in Brooklyn!), but I love NYC. Worst aid package I got, though.After all that, I just enrolled at Duke, and I’m super excited about it. I really didn’t think I would be going there, but everything eventually worked out. I think the best advice I could give would be to not think that you need to go the ‘traditional’ route. I never founded a club or went to a state academic competition or anything like that. I did what I enjoyed and tried to help out my community as best I could, and I guess it paid off.Go Blue Devils! 🔵😈