Current Bordentown
MARCH 2023 FREE
The cat’s meow for 20 years Bordentown City Cats has been rescuing, fostering and finding new homes for wayward felines for 2 decades By SUe FerrArA Cats have clearly been connected to humans forever. If you doubt that statement, just look up the history of the word “cat” on etymonline.com. Latin: catta, Byzantine Greek: katta, Old English: catt. Old Norse: köttr, Dutch: kat, Old High German: kazza, German: Katze, and from Late Latin: cattus. But despite all the names, cats come from a very small genetic line. A 2007 study looked at the genomes of 979 domestic cats and concluded “cats were domesticated in the Near East, probably coincident with agricultural village development in the Fertile Crescent,” an area in the Middle East which is defined by the Tigris, Euphrates, and Nile rivers. As the study noted, today’s domestic cats “derive from at least five founders from across this region, whose descendants were
transported across the world by human assistance.” And that human assistance for cats is how strays and ferals in Bordentown City find new homes, thanks to a rescue effort called Bordentown City Cats. The rescue began after an observation made by Mary Ann Kieffer after she moved to Bordentown City from Princeton. “I was surprised by the number of friendly cats roaming around Bordentown City,” Kieffer said in an interview. “They would follow me around. They weren’t ferals, but cats that had been left behind.” Many of the cats had been abandoned at the Bordentown City Beach, Kieffer said. After enough residents complained about the cats, Kieffer said, the police would come and round them up and take them to a shelter to be euthanized. That’s when Kieffer decided to take action. “I put an ad in a newspaper asking if there were people interested in addressing the cat problems,” Kieffer said. She was surprised by the response: 17 strangers stepped up to help organize a rescue operation. Kieffer said that the name, See CATS, Page 6
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A hero remembered
Pete Reed, left, Ukraine country director for Global Outreach Doctors, provides aid to civilians in eastern Ukraine. Reed, a Bordentown High grad, posted this photo to Facebook on Jan. 20, two weeks before he was killed during an evacuation. For more on Reed, turn to page 4. (Photo by Albert Lores.)
Classmates remember soldier 55 years after his death in Vietnam By SUe FerrArA On March 21st, Pfc. Joseph Thorn of Bordentown should be turning 73 years old. Instead, Thorn is forever 18, and never far from the thoughts of his surviving family members, and his classmates from Bordentown Regional
High School. He is gone, but thanks to those classmates, he stands as a continued reminder of what it means to serve one’s country. Thorn died on May 31, 1968, during a battle Vietnam war historians sometimes call “Little Tet.” And those same historians call
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May 1968 the bloodiest month of a very bloody year for the American forces who were in Vietnam. Peace talks began on May 10, 1968; but, according to scholar Ronald Spector, author of After Tet: The Bloodiest Year in Vietnam, those talks led to more See Thorn, Page 12
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