He’s more popular than any human, practically ubiquitous around town, and so well-known he’s been nicknamed “mayor.”
He’s also a cat.
Wanderin’ Joe, as he’s known to locals in Clintonville, Ohio, is often spotted padding along a ravine, poking his head into homes and shops of his choosing, and hanging out in the local elementary school.
He’s the school’s unofficial mascot, loved by students and staff, and is even included in annual yearbook photos. (Previously we wrote about Ziggy, another family cat who accompanies his family’s kids to school daily and took it upon himself to pose for a yearbook photo. Who knew some cats love going to school?)
The people of Clintonville love little Joe so much that they decided to throw a festival in his honor. It’s not tied in to another event or celebrated in conjunction with a holiday. It’s an event exclusively in celebration of one very special four-legged ambassador of local good will.
Nick Fancher, Joe’s human, said the little guy’s wanderlust began when the family began taking him on walks. At first Joe would pad along behind his human family, but then “he would run ahead of us and then let us catch up.”
“He’s precocious,” Fancher told WOSU, the local public radio station. “Like, I swear he was an explorer in another lifetime.”
Joe’s adventures are legion. Per WOSU, he’s been “adopted half a dozen times” by well-meaning people who mistook him for a stray, crashed weddings and memorial services, and did a six-month stint as a barn cat when yet another person mistook him for a stray and brought him home.
Fancher said he’s well aware Joe could be harmed, but worries his orange tabby buddy wouldn’t be happy if he was restricted to the indoors.
The Ohio man did not have a hand in promoting his pal. The festival, a Facebook page devoted to Joe sightings, and tributes like a charcoal portrait of Joe, were all the efforts of random admirers in Clintonville, a town of some 30,000 residents about eight miles north of Columbus.
At Joe Fest, some locals brought their own cats along, traded stories of the legendary Wanderin’ Joe over food and drink, and paid tribute to the feline himself, who graciously permitted his admirers to scratch his head and feed him snacks.
“It’s a little hard to wrap one’s head around it. It appeals to my sense of the absurd and the wonderful,” Patti Liszkay, who lives in the neighborhood, told the station. “It’s just sort of a bipartisan get together in honor of a cat. I mean, it’s gentle. It’s nice.”
Meanwhile in an attempt to avoid hard feelings, and knowing it has long been one of Buddy’s dreams to have a festival in his honor, I had this printed out and stuck it on the fridge:
Pain In The Bud 