If you didnt know Jack, then I feel sorry for you.

Because all who did meet BlackJack -- even avowed cat-haters -- were better people for the experience.
 
Yes, Black Jack -- named for former White Sox SP Jack McDowell -- was merely a cat, but...(to steal one of my own lines from another eulogy -- this one of the late great Shirley Povich) calling Jack a cat is a lot like saying Frank Sinatra could carry a tune and Picasso painted a bit.  

For nearly 12 seasons as the official cat of the Columbian Redbuds, Black Jack was everything I ever wanted to be: a cool black cat with a heart of a warrior, yet totally at home with anybody. He embodied what I like to think are my best qualities -- loyalty, friendship and a sense of making everyone feel at home.
 
Black Jack was never sick a day of his life, but was struck down by massive kidney failure and gone in a week. Jack died on Monday morning at his last home at around 6:15am.
 
All in all, Monday April 13, 2009 was a lousy, sad day for baseball. Black Jack made the trifecta with the demise later in the day of Phillies' announcer Harry Kalas and former Detroit Lions' SP Mark "The Bird" Fidrych.I know Jack and I didnt know The Bird, but I do have one Harry Kalas story to tell.
 
In the late 1990's, as my wife and step-child were about to leave me, I spent nearly every day at old County Stadium as a beat reporter, covering the Milwaukee Brewers. One early evening, in the old press box canteen, I heard that voice...
 
(If you didnt know him from Phillies' games, think either Chunky Soup commercials or This Week In The NFL.)
 
And that voice beckoned..."give me a couple bratwurst and a Budweiser..."  I turned around, said out loud, "hey, I know that voice," and then added, "uh do you really think you can get a Budweiser in this place, buddy?"
 
He slapped himself in the head and we both laughed.
 
Being in that press box for that many years, I also got to know Brewers' announcer Bob Uecker and his reaction to Kalas' death is close to what Id like to have said about my Black Jack.
 
"I know that, sooner or later, we all gotta go sometime, but I will miss that (man.)  If you didnt like (him), you didnt like anybody..."

 
Former Phillies' OF Doug Glanville wrote an op-ed in the New York Times for Kalas and the title now describes my house without Black Jack, "A Devastating Quiet."

 
Another Philly legend, Bill Conlon added, "On black-armband days like this, you think dark thoughts of loss, the sudden taking of comrades with whom you shared days, weeks, months, years, decades and generations, ...as many intertwined lives were weathered like driftwood on a tropical beach that suddenly became storm-tossed and gray."
 
Im probably somewhere between anger and guilt in my own Kubler-Ross stages of loss. Back some 10 years ago after my divorce and I was left with a couple pieces of furniture and those two kitties -- Hector and Black Jack.
 
I know what youre thinking, "YOU got furniture?!"
 
Hector left us in 2007.
 
Black Jack died at home plate last Monday.
 
Needless to say, Jack left with a small mountain of vet's bills and so I am holding a wake sometime this summer at the Mallards' ballpark. Please come out and share a nice memory of Black Jack -- nearly all of you got to meet him -- quaff a brewski in his honor and toss a couple bucks in the "kitty" to help him not die a deadbeat, like his owner.
 
No, I havent had a good cry yet -- maybe after this, but Ueck' still had it right.

If you didnt like BlackJack, you didnt like anybody.