Local businessman and educator turned author Phil Fouche and illustrator Donnie Norwood will visit Reagan Elementary School Tuesday to talk to students about their books “I Am Just a Yellow Cat,” “I Am Just a Yellow Cat on a Road Trip,” and their latest, “Captain Green Cat Saves the World.”
“I Am Just a Yellow Cat” and “I Am Just a Yellow Cat on a Road Trip” can be purchased through philfoucheauthor.com and Captain Green Cat will be available from Amazon sometime in October.
Book one, “I Am Just a Yellow Cat,” is a story about a Yellow Cat that the focus is everyone and everything needs “to love and be loved and we all need to be needed,” Fouche said.
Book two, “I Am Just a Yellow Cat on a Road Trip,” focuses on Southeast New Mexico, which is called “the playground of West Texans,” he added.
Book three, “Captain Green Cat Saves the World,” focuses on the difference between animals such as mammals and reptiles, amphibians and how important copper is to the human body.
“My purpose with my books is to entertain and educate,” Fouche said.
In “I Am Just a Yellow Cat on a Road Trip,” the Yellow Cat goes on a road trip to see Fouche and his wife, Cindy.
The book also includes Fouche’s friends Jim Blain and his late wife Camilla. Fouche dedicated the Captain Green Cat book to Camilla.
Fouche travels worldwide teaching people about corrosion control. He has taught a wide range of grades and is also a past president of the Ector County ISD Board of Trustees.
Norwood is a former educator, IT professional and board member with Ector County ISD.
In the road trip book, Fouche said he wanted to highlight all the places where people from West Texas go and tell the readers something about them.
He has a section on oil and cotton, Carlsbad Caverns, how it was formed and the variety of bats found there, Smokey Bear, the Mescalero Apache Reservation, White Sands and many other locales.
“What I really try to do, more than anything else, is have fun but be educational. Book number three that’s coming out (Captain Green Cat Saves the World) is the same way. … I love it, but it’s also educational in that I’m a teacher by trade; been very successful in business, which makes me happy, but I’ve loved teaching. I just love teaching. I talk about the difference between amphibians, reptiles, mammals, and describe it to the kids so they can understand it,” Fouche said.
The Green Cat, along with the Yellow Cat, becomes part of the family. He has also brought back the Gray Cat.
The family goes to White Sands and Yellow Cat and Green Cat go into space to the Green Planet to heal animals like beavers with no tails, a blind alligator, a good-smelling skunk and an owl that says tooh, instead of hoot. The owl was Norwood’s idea.
The planet is copper and copper enriches your blood, strengthens your tissues and muscles and makes you think faster.
But if you have too much in your blood, it can kill you.
Fouche talks about what mammals are, what amphibians are, what reptiles are — “everything but fish.”
“They go to this planet to get healed. I have a whole section in there about butyl mercaptan. … That’s what a skunk excretes. So is butyl mercaptan important in life? Absolutely, that’s what they put in pipelines so you can smell gas, because gas doesn’t have a smell. If they didn’t put it in there and you had a gas leak in your house, you’d never know it,” Fouche said.
“I have a Miss Smell Good Skunk. Skunks can’t run fast. They can’t see,” he added.
They take Miss Smell Good Skunk to the green planet and she comes back to Earth smelling bad again.
“It’s a secret trial to take animals there to see how they heal, to sometime to start taking humans there,” Fouche said.
At the end of the book, they are asked to go back into space to save the world from an asteroid. They succeed and that’s how Captain Green Cat saves the world.
His next book may be aimed at helping children understand death.
“I think I’m going to write this one about how parents should try to help kids and how the kids try to understand death,” he added.
