Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, October 6, 1995 TAG: 9510060088
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C3 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Edward Lowe, whose accidental discovery of a product he called "Kitty Litter" made cats more welcome household company and created a half-billion-dollar industry, died Wednesday at a hospital in Sarasota, Fla. He was 75.
His son, Tom, said the cause of death was complications from surgery for cerebral hemorrhage.
Cats have been domesticated since ancient Egypt, but until a fateful January day in 1947, those who kept them indoors full time paid a heavy price. For all their vaunted obsession with paw-licking cleanliness, cats' urine is one of the most noxious effluences of the animal kingdom.
Boxes filled with sand, sawdust or wood shavings provided a measure of relief from the stench, but not enough to make cats particularly welcome in discriminating homes.
That began to change in 1947, when Lowe, a 27-year-old Navy veteran who had been working in his father's sawdust business, received a visit from a cat-loving neighbor named Kaye Draper, whose sandbox had frozen.
She asked Lowe for some sawdust, but on a sudden inspiration, he suggested she try something he had in the trunk of his car - a bag of kiln-dried granulated clay, a highly absorbent mineral that his father, who sold sawdust to factories to sop up grease spills, had begun offering as a fireproof alternative.
When Draper came back a few days later asking for more, Lowe thought he might be onto something. To find out for sure, he took 10 sacks, carefully wrote ``Kitty Litter'' on the sides and filled them with five pounds of the granules.
When his suggestion that they be sold at a local store for 65 cents - at a time when sand was selling at a penny a pound - drew a hoot, Lowe suggested they be given away. When the customers returned asking for ``Kitty Litter'' by name, a business and a brand were born.
It took a while, but Lowe, who began by filling his '43 Chevy coup with hand-filled bags of Kitty Litter and visiting pet stores and cat shows, soon had a booming business.
Adapting clay for use as a cat box litter made Lowe a millionaire many times over.
Memo: shorter version ran in the Metro edition.