By Frank Lee Park, Editor | The Park Signpost
Every signpost needs a groundskeeper, and The Park Signpost has two. They are cats. They do not answer to me, and technically I do not own this house — I simply pay the mortgage on their behalf. Allow me to introduce the research department.
Madison is the orange one, plump of frame and earnest of eye. He was named for James Madison, the fourth president, a man who stood five feet four inches tall and was, not coincidentally, the smallest president in American history. Size never stopped Madison the man: he took the notes at the Constitutional Convention — the most complete record we have of the whole thing — earned the title "Father of the Constitution," and co-authored the Federalist Papers. He also said that listening to Benjamin Franklin talk at the Convention was "always a feast to me." My Madison agrees. He stares at the Franklin portrait on the office wall for hours, presumably feasting. When he handles research, he sits on it — a technique the State Department should consider.
Hamilton is the gray one, sleek and perpetually unimpressed. He was named for Alexander Hamilton, the first Treasury Secretary, who arrived in America as an orphaned immigrant teenager from the Caribbean, talked his way off the island, talked his way into Washington's war staff, and then talked so much for the rest of his life that he started a newspaper to keep up with himself (the New York Post, still running). Hamilton never retired from arguing — and notably, he was the man who invented our national debt, which my Hamilton honors by leaving me a new one every time he knocks something off the shelf.
You may notice the two founders these cats honor were colleagues before they were rivals: they wrote the Federalist Papers together, then spent the 1790s on opposite sides of every fight in Philadelphia. The cats have honored that tradition as well. They eat from separate bowls and supervise me in shifts.
Neither pays rent. Both outrank me. Welcome to The Park. 🐈🐈⬛