Greater Minnesota

Tolkkinen: Was Stanley tired of the limelight?

A popular feline vanished last month, causing consternation in a small western Minnesota town.

By Karen Tolkkinen

The Minnesota Star Tribune

January 8, 2026 at 9:16PM

Jordyn Schlauderaff, 7, of rural Otter Tail County pets the local celebrity - Stanley the hardware store cat in Vergas, Minnesota.

VERGAS, MINN. - There are celebrities who disguise themselves in wigs and sunglasses. Celebrities who get owly when you ask for their autograph.

And then there’s Stanley, arguably the most famous resident of Vergas, Minn., a city of 348 in the heart of Otter Tail County’s lakes country. A black-and-white tuxedo cat with a beauty mark that would put Marilyn Monroe to shame, he presides over Vergas Hardware and makes regular social media appearances to point out good deals. If you pet him nice, he’ll lick your hand with his pink sandpaper tongue.

Stanley went missing in December, and the news prompted an outpouring of grief on the store’s Facebook page, alongside pleas to the Almighty to bring him home.

“Oh no!!!!!!!” one woman wrote. (Except with more exclamation marks.) “Poor Stanley out in this cold!”

“Plz find your way home my heart is breaking,” wrote another.

A hairline crack began to race across my own heart, which you’d think would be toughened by the deaths of beloved pets over the years. I’d never met Stanley, but I followed him on Facebook. People loooove Stanley. I mean, they looooove him. Every month, the local assisted living center gets an update on Stanley when the county historian, a Stanley fan (a Stan stan?) visits. The section of the store that prominently displays a “VERGAS HARDWARE Home of Stanley” T-shirt is the second-most lucrative square footage of the store, led only by batteries, owner Brad Huddleston told me.

Stanley the hardware store cat is so popular in Vergas, population 348, that the store began selling this T-shirt. (Karen Tolkkinen)

You can also buy Stanley refrigerator magnets to bolster your Vergas cred.

“If you don’t have that beauty mark on your fridge, have you really been to the hardware store or Vergas, Minnesota, at all?” asked Justin Bolyard, a clerk at one of the local gas stations.

During the weeks Stanley was gone, anxiety built. Then, a week before Christmas, the hardware store learned that Stanley had been spotted at a nearby business he frequents, sitting on a tractor seat. It was about a block away, and Huddleston suspects he’d been holed up somewhere else during a blast of cold, snowy weather.

Wherever he’d been evidently didn’t offer much in the way of edibles, as he was thinner by a couple pounds.

Huddleston’s mom chauffered Stanley home, and the store put out a celebratory social media post.

“Praise God for answering your prayers!” it said, accompanied by a picture of Stanley munching on dry cat food.

The announcement drew 722 likes and loves on Facebook, more than twice the population of Vergas. To celebrate, one local created a coloring sheet of Stanley for the store to give away. A Vergas musician, Damian D. Anderson, wrote a song in his honor titled, “Stanley, Come Home for Christmas.”

When I swung by on a recent weekday, Stanley was stretched out on a tall office chair. He seemed to tolerate my petting well enough, but he seemed to adore Jordyn Schlauderaff, 7, a farm kid who has cats of her own but also loves visiting Stanley. Stanley purred and licked her hand.

Later, Alexandra Larson of Minneapolis, in town for a wedding, brought a friend from Indiana to the hardware store specifically to meet Stanley. Her friend offered Stanley a treat, which he licked politely but ultimately rejected.

Stanley curled up on a tall office chair. (Karen Tolkkinen/The Minnesota Star Tribune)

There are so many unanswered questions about Stanley’s disappearance. Did he get tired of the limelight? Had the 24-hour stretches of monitoring mouse movement grown charmless? Did someone unwittingly imprison him in a garage or a shed during his regular purrambulations?

We’ll never know.

The Huddlestons aren’t sure how old Stanley is. Nine, they think. He was already a fixture when they bought the store four years ago. Or, they quip, they bought Stanley and the store came with him. He was named via a local contest and the name fit given there’s a whole line of Stanley tools.

In fact, Vergas Hardware isn’t the only hardware store with a cat, let alone one named Stanley. My painstaking research discovered hardware store Stanleys in Georgia and Maryland. The Maryland cat sadly passed away in 2020, but the Georgia cat is apparently still purring.

Stanley is also not the only hardware store cat to go missing recently. Francine, a calico, vanished from a Lowe’s store in Richmond, Virginia in September. An Instagram account, wheresfrancine, drew more than 41,000 followers. Thanks to monitoring cameras, employees could see that she had hopped on a truck and ended up at another store 85 miles away. They set up live traps and even brought out thermal drones and eventually caught her and brought her home. A local brewery toasted her return with a “Francine Fest” community event.

Our ancestors might find it a little weird that we care so much about an animal that mainly served to keep away vermin. But in a hard world, and in a hardware world, they provide a much-needed dose of softness and affection.