EDWARD LOWE,
CAT OWNERS’ BEST FRIEND
Cats have been domesticated since ancient Egypt, but until a fateful January day in 1947, those who kept them indoors fulltime paid a heavy price. For all their vaunted obsession with paw-licking cleanliness, cats, whose constitutions were adapted for arid desert climes, make such an efficient use of water that they produce a highly concentrated urine that is one of the most noxious effluences of the animal kingdom. Boxes filled with sand, sawdust or wood shavings provided a measure of relief from the resulting stench, but not enough to make cats particularly welcome in discriminating homes.
In a story he always relished telling, that began to change in 1947, when Mr. Lowe, a twenty-seven-year-old Navy veteran who had been working in his father’s sawdust business, received a visit from a cat-loving Cassopolis neighbor named Kaye Draper, whose sandbox had frozen. She asked Mr. Lowe for some sawdust, but on a sudden inspiration he suggested she try something he had in the trunk of his car, a bag of kiln-dried granulated clay, a highly absorbent mineral that his father, who sold sawdust to factories to sop up grease spills, had begun offering as a fireproof alternative.
When Ms. Draper came back a few days later asking for more, Mr. Lowe thought he might be on to something. To find out for sure, he took ten sacks, carefully wrote the words “Kitty Litter” on the sides and filled them each with five pounds of the granules. When his suggestion that they be sold at a local store to cat owners for sixty-five cents—at a time when sand was selling at a penny a pound—drew a hoot, Mr. Lowe suggested they be given away. When the customers returned asking for “Kitty Litter” by name, a business and a brand were born.
It took a while, but Mr. Lowe, who began by filling his ’43 Chevy coupe with hand-filled bags of Kitty Litter and visiting pet stores and cat shows, soon had a booming business.
Adapting clay for use as a cat box litter made Mr. Lowe a millionaire many times over, in part because it has been credited with giving dogs a rival in American homes. Indeed, in 1985 cats passed dogs as the most popular American pets, and according to a survey by the Pet Industry Advisory Council, in 1994there were 54.2 million pet dogs in the country and 63 million cats, enough to consume $600 million to $700 million worth of clay-based cat box litter, perhaps a third of it Kitty Litter and subsidiary brands created by Mr. Lowe.
He spent lavishly on research to maintain his market position in the highly competitive industry he had created. But Mr. Lowe, who recalled growing up so poor his family burned corncobs for heat and had no indoor toilet, spent even more lavishly as a conspicuous consumer, acquiring among other things, twenty-two homes, a seventy-two-foot yacht, a stable of quarter horses, a private railroad, and an entire Michigan town.
Material success had its personal price, however, as became evident in 1984, when Mr. Lowe dismissed his four children and his three sons-in-law from their company positions, saying they were conspiring to take over the company by having him declared incompetent as an alcoholic. Mr. Lowe, who denied he had a serious drinking problem, said his three daughters had joined Al-Anon, an organization for children of alcoholics, as a ruse. The daughters said they were simply trying to understand what they regarded as his strange behavior.
In part to help other entrepreneurs avoid similar family problems, Mr. Lowe created the Edward Lowe Foundation, which sponsors a variety of programs at his 3,000-acre estate in southwestern Michigan. He sold his Kitty Litter operation for $200 million plus stock in 1990. It is now part of the Ralston Purina Company. And after a long, bitter estrangement, Mr. Lowe softened his views toward his family in his last few years, his son said.
In addition to his son, Tom, of Granger, Ind., Mr. Lowe, who was divorced in 1974, is survived by his second wife, Darlene; three daughters, Marilyn Miller of South Bend, Ind., Kathy Petersen of Washington, D.C., and Marcia O’Neil of Naples, Fla.; a sister, Meredith Murray of Fort Myers, Fla., and 12 grandchildren.
October 6, 1995