Saving Stray Cat on 55 -- Beautiful

The way Tom Dale tells it, it was just like any other morning.

He was southbound on the 55 Freeway about 8:30 a.m. on Good Friday, between the exits for Chapman Avenue and the Garden Grove Freeway. For the most part, traffic was bumper-to-bumper.

Then, he saw something coming toward him. What’s that? A cat?

Indeed. Out of nowhere, a black-and-white kitty (for now, let’s call her Frisky) was trying to navigate traffic.

Dale’s brain processed thoughts in roughly this order: Frisky was probably going to get hit. He didn’t want to see it killed. Somehow, he would rescue the cat.

And so, Dale says, he did. He got to the shoulder and walked onto the freeway, waving his arms for traffic to stop. Drivers, not moving much anyway, complied.

Realizing what Dale was up to, people directed him to a vehicle back in the line of stopped traffic. There, he found the cat hunched under the car, near the right rear wheel. On his hands and knees, Dale reached but couldn’t get it. He repositioned himself and, on his second attempt, snatched Frisky and returned with it to his car, which he estimates was 150 yards away.

“Her heart, as well as my own, was beating incredibly,” Dale says. As he was returning to his car with the cat, he says, someone yelled “You da man!”

Dale, 52, says the rescue must have been witnessed by dozens of people. And that brings us to the reason he called me.

Dale is a former accountant who lives with his mother in a small apartment in Orange. When we met Thursday morning, he showed me the rescued cat, which his 5-year-old great-nephew has named Beautiful. It’s one of three cats Dale owns.

Living on disability as the result of breaking two vertebrae in an accident 13 years ago, Dale says he’s tapped out right now and can’t afford shots or spaying for the cat.

He wants people to help pay extra expenses that he says are probably between $50 and $100.

But here’s his idea: He’s asking it only of the people who witnessed the rescue.

“The thing is, I figure there might be enough people who witnessed it whose own form of personal responsibility now would be to help the person who rescued it,” he says. “Maybe they wanted to do the same thing but didn’t. If they feel inclined, that’s what I’m appealing to, those people who saw me. I’m not trying to get my name in the paper, but if people read about the guy who picked up the cat, maybe they’ll say, ‘I’ll send him a buck.’ ”

I asked the obvious question. “Hand to God,” Dale says, “it’s no scam. People don’t even need to send the money to me,” he says. “If someone cared to, they could send it to a vet so the money never crosses my palm.”

Dale directed me to a veterinary office with whom he has dealt. The office manager knows Dale but tells me his best bet would be to take the cat to any of various public clinics that would do the job for free.

“That’s good news,” Dale says when I pass that on. “It’s not the means, it’s the end.”

So, dear reader, you’re off the hook. But can’t we still applaud Dale?

He says he did it because 25 years ago a golden retriever he didn’t know ran from his doorstep in Newport Beach and into the street, where it was struck and killed. “Horribly run over by a car,” Dale says. “Awful. I just can’t stand the thought of a poor beast suffering.”

Beautiful is doing well now, but still is bony. “She eats like you wouldn’t believe,” he says, “but it’s not sticking to her.”

Dale says he doesn’t consider his rescue heroic. “When I was 8, my godfather gave me a cat, and ever since I’ve been a cat fancier. But it wouldn’t matter if it had been a dog. I would have done the same thing. I can’t stand to see animals suffer.”

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Dana Parsons can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.