I've already provided two items about K. Itty, the Colorado Railroad Museum cat, and I still have three to go, which is probably too much feline for a railroad discussion group, even when it's a railroad cat, so I will stop after one more story. (Some years later I classified a black Colorado Railroad Museum cat, a successor to K. Itty, that liked to walk a rail, under the Whyte system as an "0-4-0 mouseburner.") But Wade referred to the photos credited to K. Itty in the Iron Horse News, and I do want to explain that.
What Bob Richardson was up to was poking fun at some stuffed shirt railfans who absolutely insisted that any historic photos they supplied anyone for publication or any other purpose be credited, "Collection of So-and-so," and be carefully restricted, not shared with others, and who in fact were not only crazy to have such photos credited to their collection but were very stingy in sharing historic photos with other interested railfans. There was in fact bitter rivalry between some such photo collectors. Bob crediting "K. Itty" as photographer of some photos he published in the Iron Horse News and adding phrases to credits such as "Not to be reproduced without the express permission of K. Itty" was in fact his way of poking fun at and ridiculing some of the more rabid photo collectors among railfans. (In my own case I've always wanted to and thought it made more sense to share copies of historic photos I've acquired, rather than boasting that I've got the only copy, then if some disaster such as fire, flood or other mishap should destroy my only copy, I could turn to people with whom I've shared to get recopies of any such photos lost.) There were apparently one or two readers of the Iron Horse News who thought there really was a Japanese photographer named K. Itty.
Then some little kid lost a plastic toy camera, not a real camera but a plastic toy that looked like a camera, at the Colorado Railroad Museum. Someone, I think Randy Danneman, got a piece of string and some masking tape and taped the string to the camera, at the right length, and then looped it over the neck of K. Itty, and either he or Bob then got a delightful photo of K. Itty casually walking down the concrete walk from the house with this little 'camera' hung around its neck, as blase' as if that was a normal occurrance and it did it every day.
When I saw that photo, that gave ME an idea. At the time, RAILROAD Magazine ran in each issue a "No. XXX in a Series of Interesting Railfans," a biographical article about some railfan illustrated with photos. So I typed up, working through several drafts, a similar little thing about K. Itty as being one in such a series, as a parody of the RAILROAD Magazine series, describing K. Itty's career as a photographer and her problem of keeping her photos "squirreled away from the squirrels" and I think I reported that she "also did some museum exhibits, some of which had to be cleaned up afterwards." Anyway, Bob retyped it to fit it around the photo, and published that little piece about the photographer, K. Itty, along with the photo of her with the toy camera.
Of course, that revealed her identity and he could no longer credit photos to her, but it was a fun piece to write and illustrate with that photo. So K. Itty joined the ranks of famous railroad photographers, thanks to Bob Richardson's wonderful and impish sense of humor.
