Finally, Fame Lures Feline From Tree

It became a weeklong evening ritual on Gain Street.

After driving home and checking on the kids, pot roast and tomato plants, residents of a shaded East Valley street would gather around a 60-foot evergreen tree and collectively wonder how a 1-year-old house cat named Tammy would ever make it down.

The Fire Department? Perhaps a tree service? Both seemed a bit expensive.

Several rescue attempts failed. Hours turned into days, days into a week. Meow Mix grew stale.

But then, on Thursday before dawn, Tammy gravitated like countless other L.A. creatures to the bright lights of fame. Television news crews--and a homeless man known to the neighborhood simply as “Fred”--coaxed the feline out of her piney perch.

Camille Ramirez, who lives next to the cat’s owner (a slightly embarrassed man who declined to discuss his role in Tammy’s escape), said the cat lived strictly indoors before slipping out last week and climbing a former Christmas tree.

She mewed hungrily for several days until television crews arrived Wednesday to cover her plight. Fascinated by the bright lights and urged on by Fred, who used a resident’s extension ladder to climb within a couple of feet of her, Tammy came down to a growing public.

Fred did not hang around to receive any accolades for his televised rescue, but residents did not hesitate to dub him a hero, “a good, kind-hearted soul,” in Ramirez’s words.