In the spring of 1997, Martha Paas, Emerita Wadsworth A. Williams Professor of Economics at Carleton College, got a call from her daughter Emily, who happened to be playing a concert with the Kansas city symphony at the time. According to Martha, Emily found a kitten playing with a leaf by a busy road, just on the side of a walkway. Emily thought the kitten might be killed, so she brought him home that night and called Martha.

Paas calls her and her husband “Big cat lovers”; the couple drove from their home in Minnesota to Kansas to pick up the kitten later known as Toff.

The Carleton Community celebrated Toff’s 28th Birthday last Tuesday with cat-shaped cupcakes in the dining halls. As part of the lasting tradition, the college’s memorable, unofficial mascot embodied the generous, humane spirit of the community. Toff passed away from cancer in 2011, but he “lives on in our memory,” said Paas, Toff’s owner.

While the tradition of celebrating Toff’s birthday remains alive today, most students know little about the story of the cat. “I know nothing about him,” said Lila Paschall ’28. Current students only see Toff in his statue in the lobby of the library, but he used to be “such a presence on campus,” according to Pass.

Toff grew up to be exactly as Paas remembered her daughter Emily describe him on that phone call. Toff was “just so poised, simply so possessed, he knew what he wanted, he was not demanding, he was lovely.” Years later, the day Emily had found the kitten began to be celebrated as Toff’s birthday.

The name Toff does not come from toffee; it is, in fact, a derogatory English slang that refers to an upper-class person. Having started Carleton’s Economics in Cambridge program, Paas considers herself very associated with England. She thus drew from the kitten’s tall and slender posture as well as his self-possessed demeanor to affectionately coin the name “Toff.”

The Paas family originally intended to raise Toff as an inside cat. One weekend, however, a friend of the family who had been taking care of him let Toff outside. After that, he just wouldn’t stay inside. Surrendering to Toff’s demand to leave the house, Martha let him out.

“He would come back, regularly, you know, for food and things, and he would sleep at night. But he started staying out longer, and we didn’t know quite what was going on, and then we started hearing from students that there was this cat, who had turned out to be quite a character,” Paas said.

Paas recalled student accounts of encountering Toff. He would wait outside the library for students to come out; he would follow them home and sleep with them. Sometimes, he would want to get out during the night, and students would have to get up to let him out.

Toff would come back from his outings, “he’d come home for breakfast and then he’d leave again,” Paas said.

However, the dorms weren’t the limit of Toff’s terrain. He also entered academic buildings with the students. He once entered his owner’s macroeconomics class. Paas said, “he came into my classroom once, just walked in, and sat down and listened to me for a while, then he got up on somebody’s lap and listened to the rest of the lecture.”

In fact, Paas once joked with colleague Jenny Bourne that he listened in macroeconomics but would fall asleep in microeconomics.

Paas describes Toff walking around as if he owned the campus. He even ventured into the president’s office. “It was his area, and you’d built a college on it, so he was just checking up to see if everything was alright.”

For many students and members of the community, Toff had a special place on campus. People began calling him the ‘college cat’ and writing him in on student elections. He once even won a student senate seat.

Toff politely declined the nomination, saying he appreciated students writing him in but could not accept as he was getting ready to go to medical school. “I just can’t take the time,” he wrote. Cats cannot write. That was, of course, Paas writing on his behalf.

Sadly, Toff died quite suddenly at age 14 from cancer. After his passing, Paas received numerous letters with condolences and accounts of what Toff meant to them while “students would say ‘I missed my cat so much and Toff would come in and sleep on my bed and make me so happy,’” recalled Paas.

After his passing, Toff was almost forgotten for a while, according to Sara Nielsen, the administrative assistant of the Economics department, who was hired in 2012, barely missing Toff’s years on campus. The department, however, honored his memory. Flyers, stickers and posters are made, detailing his story and role on campus.

While Toff is now forgotten by some, his birthday tradition lives on today. The tradition was started when Toff was still alive. Taking inspiration from another university that had a campus dog, Paas thought it would be fun to have a tradition. From there, the college community took on the job: “Somebody in the kitchen loved to make cakes and made these beautiful cakes with cats on them,” Paas said.

Toff’s birthday, the day he was found, happened to be April Fools Day, leading to many Toff-inspired pranks on campus. Once, the library announced they’d changed the name of the library to ‘Toff Memorial Library.’ Another time, they said students could check out a cat on his birthday.

Paas remembered that Toff would just appear. He was a gentle soul, proud, self possessed. When asked by a student what she thought her cat contributed to the college, she remembered responding, “Well, I think that he made people realize that you could live your life deliberately, you could decide that you were gonna do something and do it”, because that’s what Toff did. “He carried on as he wanted to live.”