Terry Lauerman likes to be around cats. With a pocketful of treats and a brush always at the ready, he spends most of his afternoons at Green Bay’s Safe Haven Pet Sanctuary, doing what he has become famous for – napping with its feline residents. And we’re talking “CBS Sunday Morning” famous. Even the BBC aired a segment about him – back in 2018 when Safe Haven staff started posting photos of Lauerman peacefully sacked out on a couch amongst a pile of cats.
The ritual started organically.
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“When you’re retired, you’ve got time,” says Lauerman, a former teacher born and raised in Milwaukee. “And if your health is good, you want to do something interesting. In the morning, I work at the [nearby St. Norbert] Abbey, and I’d be cutting down buckthorn. I don’t know if you know what buckthorn is.”
After the physical work of battling the invasive shrub-tree, Lauerman started heading over to Safe Haven – a rescue known for housing cats with special needs like a missing limb or the psychological effects of abuse – to relax.
He would visit every day they’re open, Tuesday-Saturday. What he liked about this shelter is the cats are able to roam freely inside, as opposed to being confined to cages. Invariably, Lauerman would end up on one of the comfy couches. Things escalated from there. “Well, some of them like to sit on your lap. And I just sort of fell over into [supine] position, and they just accommodated my new horizontal,” he explains.
Sanctuary founder Elizabeth Feldhausen took notice. “He was just some random guy who would fall asleep on the couch, petting and brushing the cats,” she says. “And then he just started showing up all the time. We got to know him really well, and he was always falling asleep. So I would take cute pictures of him sleeping with all the cats.” She posted the photos to the sanctuary’s social media accounts, which lit up. “I was doing interviews with other parts of the world at like, 2 a.m.,” explains Feldhausen. “It was so crazy. I don’t think I slept for like a week.”
The sanctuary staff had taken to calling Lauerman “Grandpa,” and the 81-year-old has since become easily Google-able as “Cat Grandpa Terry.”
The attention was also unexpectedly beneficial to a pet rescue that relies on donations. After the story went viral six years ago, it brought in more than $68,000, Feldhausen says – funds they’ve used to make additions including building a vet clinic next door. “We wouldn’t have been able to do that without Terry around,” she says.
The cats think Lauerman is pretty cool, too; even Safe Haven’s less socialized residents respond to him. Lauerman’s secret, Feldhausen believes, is his calm presence. “He’ll sit very still and let them come to him first,” she says. “So they kind of build up trust before he moves toward them in any way.”
Grandpa Terry fever still spikes occasionally – after the sanctuary shares Lauerman snoozing with some of his furry grandbabies. “His image has really gotten the animals with special needs out there,” Feldhausen says, “kind of proving that they can be great pets, too.”
To Lauerman, cat time is one of the things that “keeps me going. … I mean, I’m sitting here [right now], and I see one, two, three … six cats within 10 feet of me, warming themselves in the window or sitting on cat trees. It’s like home.”
