Not Our Ding-a-Ling

Not Ding-a-Ling.  But she might
have looked similar to this.

She was Uncle Tony's Ding-a-Ling.

Today, December 12, is National Ding-a-Ling Day.  And on National Ding-a-Ling Day you're supposed to call someone you haven't talked to in a while, somehow connected to the concept that a person who was a little kooky was a ding-a-ling.

Not what I'm going to write about.

My family lived in Pomona, California from about 1969 to 1971.  While we were there, we had a cat named Shazam.  Her mother was named Ding-a-Ling.  And Ding-a-Ling was not our Ding-a-Ling (a riff on the song "My Ding-a-Ling").

Ding-a-Ling was a registered, papered Siamese.  She was owned by our "Uncle" Tony.  He wasn't really our uncle, but my father grew up with only sisters, so he had a best friend who hung around a lot, and that was our uncle.

Ding-a-Ling apparently had a good pedigree, because Tony would breed her so he could sell the kittens.  But somehow, in one of those litters, Ding-a-Ling had a kitten who was solid black.

I have learned since then that cats can become pregnant by more than one male.  I have no idea how well Tony monitored Ding-a-Ling, but because she was a source of revenue, I'm guessing reasonably well.  I have also learned that sometimes you can just have a throwback kitten.  One friend of mine insists that it not all that uncommon for a Siamese to have a throwback black (or really, really dark brown) kitten.

Whatever the cause, you can't sell a solid black kitten for money as a papered Siamese.  And somehow we were given the kitten.  I know Shazam was a kid's comic book around that time, but we kids weren't really old enough to be into comic books.  And I think my mother is the person who named her.  None of the entries for Shazam available on Wikipedia make sense for her inspiration.

But really, I wanted to write today about Ding-a-Ling and, by extension, my Uncle Tony.

I remember Uncle Tony's name, but that's about it.  I can't recall anything about what he looked like or what he was like.

One event that sticks out in my memory is before my family lived in Pomona.  We might still have been in La Puente.  It was winter, but we didn't get snow down in the Los Angeles Basin.  My father and Uncle Tony drove up to Mount Baldy in a pickup truck (maybe Tony's), filled the bed with snow, drove back down, and dumped the snow in the yard.  That was our first encounter with snow.  We might have made a snowman.  Or the snow might have melted too quickly.

In 1971 my family moved to Australia and lived there for two years.  When we returned to the United States, we went to Florida instead of the West Coast.  My parents never returned to California to live.

My father was not as good at staying in touch with his friends as my mother was, so we totally lost contact with Uncle Tony.

Now fast forward about five decades.  Suddenly, out of the blue, my father tells me he wants me to find out what happened to Uncle Tony.  The first thing I had to ask was, what was his full name?  All I knew was Uncle Tony.

And I learned that it was Tony Scalise.  There was a good probability that Tony was short for Anthony, Antonio, Antony, or something along those lines.

But that's all my father could tell me.  If he had ever known Tony's birthday, it was long gone from his memory.  (I suspect he never knew.  My father was like that.  I bet my mother knew, though.)

I know someone with the family name Scalise.  It's a good Italian name.  So I asked her how common it was.  Not good news.  Not the most common name, but common enough, especially with a popular given name of Antony/Antonio.

So without a birthdate or anything more definitive, I could not find Uncle Tony.  I did try, but I didn't get anywhere, and Daddy couldn't tell me anything more.  He died in 2019, without me having found Uncle Tony.

But he asked me to find out what happened to Tony, and I'm still trying to do that.  When I learned about National Ding-a-Ling Day, it immediately reminded me of his cat Ding-a-Ling, and I felt inspired to write about him and send it out to the universe.

Maybe someone who knew Tony will come across this blog post and contact me.  I've had cousins find me that way, so it could happen.

So, Uncle Tony, I'm thinking about you on Ding-a-Ling Day.  And thinking about Ding-a-Ling.