"'A "good" family, it seems, is one that used to be better."
"As anyone who has ever been around a cat for any length of time well knows, cats have enormous patience with the limitations of the human kind."
"I can't take a well-tanned person seriously."
"The facts of life are very stubborn things."
"The New England conscience does not stop you from doing what you shouldn't-it just stops you from enjoying it."
"The opera is like a husband with a foreign title - expensive to support, hard to understand and therefore a supreme social challenge."
Cleveland Amory was an American
authorAn author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...
who devoted his life to promoting
animal rightsAnimal rights, also known as animal liberation, is the idea that the most basic interests of non-human animals should be afforded the same consideration as the similar interests of human beings...
. He was perhaps best known for his books about his cat, named Polar Bear, whom he saved from the
ManhattanManhattan is the oldest and the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the state of New York...
streets on
Christmas EveChristmas Eve refers to the evening or entire day preceding Christmas Day, a widely celebrated festival commemorating the birth of Jesus of Nazareth that takes place on December 25...
1977. The executive director of the Humane Society of the United States described Amory as "the founding father of the modern animal protection movement."
Biography
Amory attended
HarvardHarvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
where he was president of
The Harvard CrimsonThe Harvard Crimson, the daily student newspaper of Harvard University, was founded in 1873. It is the only daily newspaper in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is run entirely by Harvard College undergraduates...
. Upon graduation, Amory became the youngest editor ever of
The Saturday Evening PostThe Saturday Evening Post is a bimonthly American magazine. It was published weekly under this title from 1897 until 1969, and quarterly and then bimonthly from 1971.-History:...
. During the Second World War Amory served in
military intelligenceMilitary intelligence is a military discipline that exploits a number of information collection and analysis approaches to provide guidance and direction to commanders in support of their decisions....
in the
United States ArmyThe United States Army is the main branch of the United States Armed Forces responsible for land-based military operations. It is the largest and oldest established branch of the U.S. military, and is one of seven U.S. uniformed services...
from 1941 to 1943. He joined the board of directors of the
Humane Society of the United StatesThe Humane Society of the United States , based in Washington, D.C., is the largest animal advocacy organization in the world. In 2009, HSUS reported assets of over US$160 million....
in 1962, remaining there until 1970. In 1967, he founded the Fund for Animals. Amory was also the president of the New England Anti-vivisection Society (NEAVS) from 1987 until his death of an
abdominal aortic aneurysmAbdominal aortic aneurysm is a localized dilatation of the abdominal aorta exceeding the normal diameter by more than 50 percent, and is the most common form of aortic aneurysm...
in 1998.
He also was a
televisionTelevision is a telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images that can be monochrome or colored, with accompanying sound...
critic for
TV GuideTV Guide is a weekly American magazine with listings of TV shows.In addition to TV listings, the publication features television-related news, celebrity interviews, gossip and film reviews and crossword puzzles...
during the 1960s and 1970s. Amory is noted for recruiting celebrities such as
Doris DayDoris Day is an American actress, singer and, since her retirement from show business, an animal rights activist. With an entertainment career that spanned through almost 50 years, Day started her career as a big band singer in 1939, but only began to be noticed after her first hit recording,...
,
Angie DickinsonAngie Dickinson is an American actress. She has appeared in more than fifty films, including Rio Bravo, Ocean's Eleven, Dressed to Kill and Pay It Forward, and starred on television as Sergeant Suzanne "Pepper" Anderson on the 1970s crime series Police Woman.-Early life:Dickinson, the second of...
, and
Mary Tyler MooreMary Tyler Moore is an American actress, primarily known for her roles in television sitcoms. Moore is best known for The Mary Tyler Moore Show , in which she starred as Mary Richards, a 30-something single woman who worked as a local news producer in Minneapolis, and for her earlier role as...
for his campaigns against fur clothing. He purchased the first ocean going vessel for Captain
Paul WatsonPaul Watson is a Canadian animal rights and environmental activist, who founded and is president of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, a direct action group devoted to marine conservation....
, the founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. Watson used this boat in his first actions against the Japanese whaling fleet. He enjoyed playing
chessChess is a two-player board game played on a chessboard, a square-checkered board with 64 squares arranged in an eight-by-eight grid. It is one of the world's most popular games, played by millions of people worldwide at home, in clubs, online, by correspondence, and in tournaments.Each player...
and was a member of the New York Athletic Club.
In 1988, he made his only film appearance in the role of Mr. Danforth in
Mr. NorthMr. North is a 1988 American comedy-drama film starring Anthony Edwards, based on the 1973 novel Theophilus North by Thornton Wilder.Directed by Danny Huston, the film became a family project; produced by John Huston, it also stars Anjelica Huston, Danny's future wife Virginia Madsen, and Allegra...
.
In 2005, the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) formed a corporate combination with the Fund for Animals. The HSUS now operates the Cleveland Amory Black Beauty Ranch, a sanctuary for animals in Texas.
Amory was the subject of a 2006 biography
Making Burros Fly by Julie Hoffman Marshall.
Books
- The Cat Who Came for Christmas
The Cat Who Came for Christmas is the first book written by Cleveland Amory, an American author who wrote extensively about animal rights. In this book Amory recounts his rescue and adoption of Polar Bear, a cat he featured in several more books....
- The Cat and the Curmudgeon
- The Best Cat Ever
- Hometown
- The Proper Bostonians
- Who Killed Society? (1960) Table of Contents.
- Cleveland Amory's Compleat Cat
- The last resorts
- Animail
- Newport: There she sits
- Cat Tales: Classic Stories from Favorite Writers
- Man Kind? Our Incredible War on Wildlife
- 1902 Edition of The Sears, Roebuck Catalog
- The Trouble with Nowadays : A Curmudgeon Strikes Back
- Ranch of Dreams: A Lifelong Protector of Animals Shares the Story of His Extraordinary Sanctuary
Further reading
- Cleveland Amory: media curmudgeon & animal rights crusader, Marilyn S. Greenwald, University Press of New England
The University Press of New England , located in Lebanon, New Hampshire and founded in 1970, is a university press consortium including Brandeis University, Dartmouth College , the University of New Hampshire, and Northeastern University...
, Lebanon, New HampshireAs of the census of 2000, there were 12,568 people, 5,500 households, and 3,178 families residing in the city. The population density was 311.4 people per square mile . There were 5,707 housing units at an average density of 141.4 per square mile...
, 2009, ISBN 9781584656814
External links