Harold W. Sims Jr., a fanatic for all things feline, who poured his life savings into his own no-kill animal shelter and then took his passion a step further by founding the American Museum of the House Cat, displaying some 10,000 cat-themed artifacts, including antique windup tabbies and an ancient Egyptian cat mummy, died on Nov. 17 in Sylva, N.C. He was 89.
His death, at a care facility, was confirmed by Kaleb Lynch, who helped run the shelter and served as Dr. Sims’s caregiver.
Dr. Sims discovered his love for cats relatively late in life. After retiring from teaching at a Florida community college, he needed something to occupy his time until his wife, Kay, retired as well, and they could fulfill their dream of moving to Western North Carolina.
He began volunteering at an animal shelter, where he helped care for cats. Around the same time, he and Kay adopted their first feline, a Persian named Buzzy.
As cat ownership tends to go, one led to another, and then three, and four, until the couple — by then ensconced in the rural Appalachian Mountains — were caring for 13 furry friends.
“Cats don’t start wars. They have no gods to pray to. They don’t mess up the environment. They just live.”
Dr. Sims was a determined man full of ideas. After he learned that his local shelter euthanized animals, he decided to open his own.
It started as a shed in his backyard, and by 2002 had expanded into a 4,000-square-foot house that he outfitted, using $150,000 of his retirement money, with cat towers, cubbyholes and all the toys his new tenants could swat a paw at — but not a single cage.
“No cat that’s a stray or has been relinquished by its owner has committed any crime,” he said in “Little Works of Art,” a 2017 documentary about his work. “Why should a cat be put in jail?”
He called the shelter Catman2 — a nod to his nickname among locals and a play on Kathmandu, the Nepalese capital renowned among footloose dreamers as a kind of latter-day Eden.
Soon he was hosting up to 70 cats at a time, hauling so many bags of litter in his sedan every week that its rear bearings cracked. Over nearly three decades, Catman2 has found homes for more than 5,000 cats.
Because the job of literally herding cats was not enough for Dr. Sims, he opened the American Museum of the House Cat in 2017.
The museum’s first location was in an antiques mall in Cullowhee, N.C., but it quickly outgrew the space — not only because of all the items Dr. Sims wanted to display, but also because foot traffic was higher than anyone had expected.
“People thought I was crazy,” he told USA Today in 2019. “They told me that nobody wanted a cat museum. Well, it turned out that a lot of people did.”
In 2023, he built a new home for the museum in Sylva, N.C. There, the several thousand people who visit each year can take in wall after wall of cat-themed paintings, rows of display cases full of antique cat toys and a child-size, cat-themed carousel.
Some of the displays are macabre: Dr. Sims had a petrified cat found in a 16th-century English chimney, as well as a mummified cat from ancient Egypt, which he had X-rayed to make sure there were actual feline remains beneath the wrapping. (There are.)
On the way out, visitors can buy one of Dr. Sims’s eight books, including an illustrated children’s trilogy about a character named “Kevin the Helpful Vampire Cat” and “Poems, Songs and Other Silly Things About Cats.”
Dr. Sims could often be found at the museum, giving tours and espousing the wisdom of the feline.
“Cats don’t start wars. They have no gods to pray to. They don’t mess up the environment. They just live,” he told USA Today. “I wish cats could rule the world. We wouldn’t be in such a mess if that were the case.”
Harold Walter Sims Jr. was born on April 8, 1935, in Mt. Vernon, a northern suburb of New York City. His mother, Evelyn (Smith) Sims, managed the home, while his father held a number of short-term jobs, including driving a milk truck.
When Harold was still young, his family moved to upstate New York, where his father raised chickens and Harold worked on nearby dairy farms.
He spent three years in the Navy, and then attended Florida State University, where he received a bachelor’s degree in 1961 and a master’s in 1967, both in biology. He received a doctorate in education from Nova Southeastern University, in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., in 1976.
Dr. Sims spent about a decade working for the Florida Department of Natural Resources and the Board of Health in Hillsborough County, home to Tampa. He then taught biology at St. Petersburg Junior College (now St. Petersburg College), retiring in 1991.
His love for cats, he said, grew out of his belief that they are in many ways a better version of ourselves.
“The more I learned, the more I began to believe that they’re smarter than we are,” he said. “Cats don’t discriminate. They don’t care if you’re white or Black or yellow. Plus, cats don’t care about what other cats have. A cat has what it has, and that’s fine with him.”
Kay Sims died in 2021. Along with the many residents of Catman2, Dr. Sims is survived by his own three house cats, Tortie, Clarissa and Eskimo.
The post Harold W. Sims Jr., Whose Museum Honored the House Cat, Dies at 89 appeared first on New York Times.
