
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, June 1, 1990                   TAG: 9006010105
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: B1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: ED SHAMY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

FELLOW FEEDS, FRETS OVER FELINES

Dan McKee wheels his Chrysler Cordoba to the edge of the Kroger parking lot, honking his horn, and pulls to a stop. He gets out of the car and starts calling his friends.

Bernice, Midnight, Elvira, Tabatha, Priscilla, Max - a Persian, a calico, a tabby and a Siamese; a black one, a white and gold one.

McKee is peering down a steep, rocky hillside, craggy outcrops along King Street in Northeast Roanoke shaded by tall weeds and brush.

Slowly, his friends emerge. They are all cats, misfits left to fend for themselves on the rocks over the years.

Every night that he is able, McKee visits to tend to the six bowls left for them on a flat, rocky ledge. He washes the bowls and adds fresh water, he pours out a quart of milk he buys specially for the cats. And in a creased old steel garbage can, he pours cat food.

The abandoned cats are skittish and shy around strangers. But they trust Dan McKee, his mother Maxine, and two or three other people who tend them.

The caretakers leave notes for one another on bushes. Some have never met.

"Remember December, when we had that terrible cold weather? I was here every night," says McKee. Disabled in an auto accident a decade ago, he walks with a limp and is unable to work. He budgets a portion of his regular disability checks for the cats.

They are his pride and joy.

"I just don't like to see anything go hungry," he says with a shrug, the only explanation he can offer for his chivalry. "Cats are people, too."

But these cats, holed up a couple of hundred feet from Kroger and just as far from the heavy traffic on U.S. 460, irk someone else.

Someone complained to Kroger that the cats hiss at leashed dogs, and Dan McKee heard the cats' days were numbered. They would be trapped, carted off to a shelter and put up for adoption. Eventually, without homes, they would be destroyed.

But Jim Reeves of the Kroger regional office in Roanoke said the store plans no action against the cats, that it doesn't mind or care that they are there.

"We aren't going to do anything except tell the property owner that they are there," Reeves said.

For Dan McKee, it's a reprieve of sorts.

by CNB