Cat's Meow

April 29, 2005

BOB MARTINSON/Frontiersman reporter

PALMER - John Milward loves animals so much he named his business after a cat he saved from an abusive owner back in Wales.

"Poor Fletcher didn't have but two teeth left in his whole head, but I loved him just the same," said Milward, owner of Fletcher's Auto Body in Palmer. "So I brought him here with me from London and now he's buried out in my orchard."

His passion for animals' welfare may be why he ended up working as a shelter assistant at the Mat-Su Borough's Animal Care and Regulation shelter.

"Too many people just drop an animal, because they don't want to take care of it anymore and I just can't look at an animal as something you shouldn't take care of. They are like family members," he said.

He lives with his wife, Kathy, and daughter, Megam, at the foot of Lazy Mountain, next to a babbling creek where he has an expansive view of Pioneer and Matanuska peaks. There he keeps ducks, pheasants, peacocks, Polish chickens, geese, a dog and some cats.

Milward still likes to do auto-body work in his shop at his home and is currently restoring his 1966 Mark X Jaguar, complete with the steering wheel on the right side of the car and British plates.

The full-time work he puts in at the shelter, however, restricts his auto-body work to weekends.

Milward was born in Cardiff, the capital city of Wales. The river Taff runs through the city, hence, the Welsh have the nickname, "Taffies." When he was about 15, he found a job as a stable boy at a high-rated jumping stable named Faulk-Walwyn. There, he became an apprentice jockey.

"I was coming over some pretty high jumps and I fell off so many times I was lucky to not have been hurt badly," he said. He then went on to become an apprentice jockey at a flat-track stable, under Major Peter Nelson, a renowned trainer in that field. There, he worked for about a year until, he said, he got too heavy for the job.

Milward isn't a large man, but as a boy, he said he was only about 4 feet tall, so it gave him the opportunity to pursue the chance to ride.

Milward then spent five years in the British military.

"It taught me how to keep tidy and taught me respect, but I didn't like it and it didn't like me," he said.

Milward has traveled frequently. He is a former mechanic and engineer with British Airways and another private airline that worked for the British government, operating out of Libya, Egypt, Malta, among other nations.

"I did the route between Egypt and Israel, flying back and forth between there for quite awhile, just after the first Five Day War," he said.

The time he spent in Africa was where he met his wife, Kathy, whom he describes as "a born and bred Palmerite." Kathy worked as a flight attendant for a company called Club Alaska, which supplied flight-related employees to other companies around the world.

"She's from a longtime Palmer family," John said. "We met while I was working in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and she had just hopped a flight over from Sudan to get some change."

Milward reflected on his old job.

"One day, I was wearing the wrong uniform and this guy who thought I was the pilot came up to me in a cockpit and said, 'Do you want to fly it,' so I just said 'Sure,' and I hopped in the pilot's seat, but I didn't take it much further than that," he said.

After the two of them got together, Kathy wanted to continue living somewhere abroad, but John wanted to live on the property they had in Palmer.

The couple lived in several African nations before moving back to England for a few years. Then they moved to Palmer about 10 years ago.

"Who wouldn't want to live here?" Milward said, sipping coffee on a beautiful spring day as he sat on a lawn chair in front of his home. "I lived five minutes from the airport in London and we had Concordes taking off twice a day. It was like thunder going off, it was. Now that I'm here working at the shelter, maybe that's where I'm supposed to end up."