Riding in style

The cat's out of the air bag

Daily Breeze (Torrance, CA) - May 22, 2002

Author: Josh Grossberg

The cat's out of the air bag

TORRANCE: Honda dealership comes to the rescue after a 6-week-old tabby slips behind the dashboard of a customer's car.

It's generally a good thing to hear a purring sound under the hood of a car.

That is, unless the purring is coming from a cat. It's a lesson Chris Walker learned the hard way.

As he was leaving the post office near his Inglewood home Monday morning, Walker heard a faint meowing from a cat hiding in the bushes. Before the day was over, the 6-week-old tabby would have a new home. Walker's car, however, is another tale.

"I saw a cute little kitten stuck between the thorns," said Walker, a 30-year-old store manager for Office Depot.

After receiving a few scratches for his efforts, Walker managed to get the cat safely into his 2001 Honda Accord. Well, safe for the cat maybe. On the drive home, the kitty began snooping around. No problem, Walker thought. It's not like the cat can go anywhere. But when he got home, the only sign of his new friend was a tail poking out from under the dashboard. As he tried to coax the animal out, it went the other direction and Walker became frantic.

"Oh my goodness, this cat's gonna die in my car," he thought. "I called friends, I got tuna fish and stuck it in the car and waited an hour, but no dice. I started ripping stuff out, but it exceeded my expertise."

Walker called Scott Robinson Honda in Torrance for help and they told him to come right over. Like emergency room doctors, a team of mechanics pounced on the car.

Out came the air conditioner. Out came the air bags. But no cat.

"We tore that car apart," said Eric Bolstad, the dealership's director of the parts, body shop and service departments. "The whole wire harness behind the glove box was out. All I could see was this ball of fur behind the dash. That thing was meowing up a storm."

They almost got him out a few times, but the cat had other ideas.

"We were in the process of getting him free, but the kitten decided to climb even higher. There's a 2-inch solid bar that is part of the reinforcement structure of the dash and he got his head stuck between the bar and the ventilation system."

Walker watched in horror as his car was disassembled piece by piece.

"They took out each piece, each screw, each nut, bolt and washer," he said. "I'm thinking, `This is going to be an expensive cat. He's going to live with me for the rest of my life.' "

It turned out not to be as expensive as he had thought. The crew at the Honda dealership did it for free. And since they couldn't put the car back together again by closing time, they also threw in a loaner for the day.

"They gave me a bill stating no charge," Walker said. "That was the first happy thing to happen to me."

Finally, someone managed to grab the cat and pull him free.

"The process took an hour and a half," Bolstad said. "When we got it out, we opened a can of cat food and it ate up a storm."

After loading the cat into the car, Walker started to head home. But cats are creatures of habit.

"I looked down and realized he was trying to get back under the dashboard," Walker said. "I had to stop and buy a carrier."

Man and car are once again safe and sound. The kitten was adjusting to his new home Tuesday. All that was left was to name his new pal.

To commemorate the day's events, he decided on the most appropriate option: Honda.

Caption: 1) Chris Walker picks up his car, and a cat, from ScottRobinson Honda of Torrance on Tuesday after the 6-week-old tabby got stuck in the dashboard. Walker has named his new friend Honda. 2) Noel Hara, Adolfo Torres and Carlos Gonzales were among ScottRobinson workers who took the car's interior apart to get the cat. The work was free.

Story No 2:

'Check engine,' find a surprise

Daily Breeze (Torrance, CA) - June 25, 2003

Author: Josh Grossberg

'Check engine,' find a surprise

TORRANCE:

Scott Robinson Honda mechanics discover opossums with the usual "horses" under the hood.

By Josh Grossberg

They weren't merely playing possum. Nope, these babies were the real deal.

And imagine the mechanic's surprise when he opened the hood of a 2002 Honda Accord and found two tiny, beady-eyed opossums hissing at him Tuesday morning.

"One opened its mouth and I ran away," said Noriaki Matsubuchi, a mechanic at Scott Robinson Honda in Torrance. "I was so scared when I saw something moving."

How long the marsupials had been under there, nobody knows. The owner of the car, 17-year-old Margaret Choi of Torrance, hadn't driven it for a few days. But when she turned on the ignition Sunday, the "check engine" light came on and she brought it in to be serviced.

That's when the pair of interlopers were discovered.

"This is deja vu," said Eric Bolstad, the dealership's director of the parts, body shop and service departments, recalling a similar incident last year when a kitten had crawled deep into a car and had to be rescued.

But an opossum?

"We've had to remove rodents, but never had two animals nested in a car before," Bolstad said as a group of mechanics stood around nodding in agreement.

After getting no help from the local animal control office, Bolstad decided to release the opossums into the bushes in back.

"We called animal control and they said they would not pick them up until we secured them in a box, so we just released them in a big planter bed," Bolstad said.

The duo were about big enough to survive on their own, giving them better odds than if animal control had picked them up, because they would have been put down, said Ann Lynch of the animal rescue group South Bay Wildlife Rehab.

When they're born, opossums are about the size of a lima bean so these guys had been around awhile, Lynch said. And she was surprised to learn they were building a home under the hood of a car.

"I cannot imagine where all the sticks came from," she said. "They're not known to nest. They're a walking nest."

By eating through an oxygen sensor, the pair wound up costing Choi $250. But the folks at the Honda dealership picked up the tab for the labor.

When Bolstad called Choi and her mother, Grace, and told them there were animals in their car, they came by to see for themselves.

"Oh, my God," Grace Choi gasped when she saw the squatters for the first time.

And then, after regaining her composure, daughter turned to mother and uttered the inevitable.

"Can we keep them?"