Room 8

Room 8 was a grey tabby tomcat who wandered into a classroom — room number 8 — at Elysian Heights Elementary School in the Echo Park neighbourhood of Los Angeles in the late 1940s, and decided to stay. For about sixteen years he returned to the school each autumn when classes resumed, spending his summers roaming the neighbourhood and his term-times presiding over lessons, napping on desks and being cared for by generations of children. His remarkable loyalty made him a local legend and then a national one: he received thousands of letters a year, was the subject of a documentary and a children's book, and his life was covered by newspapers across the United States. When Room 8 died in 1968, his obituary in the Los Angeles Times ran to several columns — extraordinary for a cat — and the children raised money for a headstone at a pet cemetery. A mural of him still decorates the school wall, and the building's connection to its famous cat is remembered to this day.