A noisemaker that’s supposed to sound like a cat

“What’s that on the bottom shelf,” my auction buddy Janet asked from where she sat in a folding chair in the front row of the auction house. I followed her eye to an open box of short cylindrical items with a series of small holes on the top.

“They look like doll criers,” I said. On first glance, they resembled those boxes with holes you see in the belly of some dolls. Any little girl who’s ever had a doll that cries is familiar with them. That was not what these were, though; those inside the dolls were plain and meant to be hidden. These were not.

I asked the auction staffer behind the glass cases to take them out so I could get a closer look. Placing the box on the counter, he was obviously as intrigued by them as Janet and me. I had missed them on my first look through the cases; perhaps because they were on the bottom shelf or because I was more interested in the pair of Skookum dolls on the shelf above them.

They had the shape of a salt box, just smaller. “Cat Cry” was written in bold white capital letters on the paper wrapping, with graphics of cute little black and white cats at play. One was even crawling out of a boot. There were 17 of the criers in colors of red, green and blue.

Both the staffer and I instantly knew that these were meant to be rocked to produce a sound – a meow, I presumed. We each picked up one and gently rocked. Nothing. Then we each picked up another; this time I rocked a little harder and a few more times. Nothing.

“Maybe they’ve dried up,” he said. I wasn’t sure what made the sound in criers, but I always thought they were mechanical because I could feel a weight move inside them. (This YouTube video shows the inside of a doll crier).

I finally found one that had half-a-sound on the back end of the rock. But it sounded more like a doll than a cat. I don’t think the staffer ever got a sound out of the ones he checked.

I finally pushed the criers back to him so he could replace them in the glass case. But I was curious about what they were and what they were used for. They were obviously a novelty item, a noisemaker not unlike the ones for New Year’s Eve or Halloween. Those appear at auction from time to time, but these criers were unfamiliar to me.

The label on the criers showed that they were made in Japan, and they carried a logo and patent number, which was of little use to me. I suspected that they were among those inexpensive circa 1950s Japanese exports that show up on the auction tables pretty often.

Googling later, I could find out very little about the cat criers. I found two selling on eBay – one with a price of $3.99 and another made in Taiwan and selling for $12.95. Both were being sold as noisemakers. I also found ceramic Siamese cat salt and pepper shakers made in Japan with noisemakers; one set apparently was purchased as a souvenir in Wildwood, NJ.

These noisemakers were the toys of Baby Boomers, according to one article, and the most popular was the Moo Cow Can, which is now an iPhone app (and Android app, too). The article mentioned several others of these “squeaker” toys, including a Metlox cookie jar with a crier in the lid – one of which sold on eBay for $49.99 with a crier inside the jar and not the lid. The writer of the article acknowledged that he/she had little historical information about these items.

The Moo Cow noisemaker seems to have endured. You can buy them new on retail sites on the web and on eBay, and they were being sold as toys for children or as gag gifts for adults. Here’s a YouTube video of the Moo Cow in a trailer for the 2010 movie “Despicable Me.”

At auction, the cat criers weren’t so popular, even when the auctioneer mentioned that a few of them worked (wrong!). The entire box sold for only $5 to a sole bidder.