Smith: Believe it or not, Sonoma County’s 109-year-old is going to Hollywood

A woman in Florida phoned after reading about the 109th birthday dinner at La Gare in Railroad Square for Santa Rosa native Art Janssen, one of the oldest and, I think, sweetest men in the world.

The caller was Sabrina Sieck, a manager with the company that owns the “Ripley's Believe It or Not” amusement empire.

Sabrina said the firm is celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Believe It or Not phenomenon begun when Santa Rosa-born Robert Ripley drew his first stranger-than-truth newspaper cartoon in 1918. Ripley's zeal and his fascination with the bizarre and barely believable, you may know, came to make him one of the best known and best paid people anywhere.

The firm Sabrina works for, Ripley's Entertainment Inc., operates about 30 Ripley's Odditoriums. And the company takes part in the Hollywood Christmas Parade.

Sabrina said to mark the 100th year of Ripley's Believe It or Not, the company thought it would be the cat's meow to have in its parade entry a 109-year-old man from Ripley's hometown of Santa Rosa, California.

So Art will be in Tinseltown, at the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Orange Avenue, when the parade steps off Sunday evening. And I, and Art's good friend and helper Denise Thompson of Santa Rosa, will be with him.

TV cameras will capture the parade and its preceding concert, but the festivities won't be broadcast until 8 p.m. on Dec. 14, on the CW Network.

I've read that more than 1 million people turn out for the parade, and a whole passel of celebrities. But I'm guessing there will be only person there who's 109 or older.

And he's our guy.

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CATS IN PARADISE: Forestville's Shannon Jay, who following our fire of 2017 ventured out night after night and went to boggling lengths to catch suffering and terrifying cats, is in Butte County.

He's having trouble believing the vastness and horror of the Camp fire.

“This is just a monstrous scale,” said Shannon, who works as a National Park Service officer and rescues fire cats on his own time. He expects that thousands of pet cats were scattered, injured or killed in Butte County, compared to the hundreds impacted by the Tubbs fire.

One of several Sonoma County cat rescuers in and near Paradise, Shannon rescued one cat from the chassis of an incinerated pickup as videographer Douglas Thron rolled his camera.

The video is hard to watch and to hear. Shannon said it took an hour and half for him to jack up the pickup and at last get a hand on the pitifully crying cat.

The video shows that he was overcome by emotion after he latches the injured gray cat into a travel crate.

“She's alive and healing in the hospital,” he said.

Also in Butte County and trying to find, trap and return cats amid hugely complex and difficult circumstances are Jennifer Petruska and other Tubbs fire veterans with Sonoma & Napa Fires Pet Rescue & Reunification.

Those volunteers plead for crates and supplies that can be ordered from Amazon here and shipped to 469 Southbury Lane, Chico CA 95973.

The group's Butte County rescue wish list is on its Facebook page.

You can reach columnist Chris Smith at 707-521-5211 and chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com.