BROWERVILLE, MINN. – Gordon Johnson sold his barber shop in downtown Browerville and moved his family to a farm with a Clarissa address. As with most Minnesota farms in the 1960s, the Johnson place was overrun with cats, reproducing enthusiastically and keeping away the vermin.
These Johnson farm cats were almost as unusual for their diet as were Ernest Hemingway’s cats for their six toes on his estate in Key West, Fla.
“They were potato eaters,” Gary Johnson said. “My dad had a guy who would give him 50-pound bags of potatoes. He’d boil up a big pot and put ’em out in the yard, and the cats would come running.