A green-eyed tabby roams USC’s campus. Students call him their ‘good luck cat’
Figaro is a handsome, green-eyed fellow with irresistible charm.
The University of South Carolina is his home, where he roams the Horseshoe, surveying campus with a watchful, unwavering gaze.
He’s a quiet type, and he keeps to himself. But he’ll rarely turn down a friendly face.
The surly tabby, nicknamed “Figgy,” has become something of a pillar on the university’s campus.
Jenna Scribano and Sarah Francis, two USC freshmen, live in Capstone, one of Figaro’s old haunts. They stop and crouch down to give the snoozing cat a scratch. They have cats at home, and Figgy is a kind of “surrogate pet” while at USC.
“He just showed up one day,” Scribano said. Now, she keeps an eye out for him on walks to and from class. When she sees him, it’s “cat time,” — her favorite time of day.
Every time Francis sees him, she sends a picture to her friends.
“It’s a good sign,” Francis said. “It means it’s gonna be a good day. It’s a good luck cat for sure.”
Figaro was adopted by the C.S. Lewis Center at USC almost four years ago, when a student’s family could no longer care for him.
Though in truth, he belongs simultaneously to no one and everyone. The “emancipated feline” has a mind of his own, said Rev. Paul Sterne, who runs the center. He was meant to be an indoor cat, Sterne said, but he got a taste of freedom and “never looked back.” Now he wanders campus on his own year-round.
Sterne takes him to his annual check-up with the veterinarian, and afterwards Figaro is wary of him for little while. Though it’s a quarrel easily mended by treats.
But Sterne doesn’t know where he goes at night, or when the winter months bring a chill. He’s illusive that way, and independent to a fault. And Sterne rarely has to feed Figaro — he doesn’t have to, the cat rarely goes hungry.
“He loves everybody,” Sterne said. “He’s very soft and very sweet and a lot of people will carry treats.”
Now, Figaro is a bit of a celebrity. He’s even got an Instagram page.
Figaro spends his days lounging on a heated vent, or crouching in bushes, watching the passersby. But the mischievous cat gets into trouble too. Sterne once found Figaro on the roof of a house, and after a hurried phone call to the Columbia Fire Department, learned that Figaro was on his own.
“If he can get up there, he can get down,” the department told him.
So, Sterne enlisted the help of two others, who finally got Figaro down.
“It was crazy,” Sterne said. “They almost killed themselves.”
But Figaro is simply the most well-known face of a long-standing tradition for the center.
Sterne, an Anglican priest, took up ministry at the university nearly 20 years ago, in an old, white house on College Street with a wraparound porch. Now the C.S. Lewis Center, it was gifted to the church by Rosamond Kent Sprague, a longtime philosophy professor at USC.
Sterne moved in with two cats, Perpetua and Felicitas. Cats are good icebreakers when Sterne meets new people, including students, he said. They are useful for ministry in that way.
Even now, Sterne takes care of Edmund and Eustace, named for Lewis’ acclaimed children’s series, “The Chronicles of Narnia.” They are also well-known to students, Sterne said. But none so loved as Figgy.
