F-14 Tomcat Mascot Embroidered Patch

The Tomcat cat was drawn with two tails and a six-shooter on his left side, because the F-14 has twin vertical tails and carries its gun on the left side of the nose. Jim Rodriguez, a Grumman artist from 1962 to 1984, drew him in the early 1970s at the request of Norm Gandia, a former Blue Angels pilot. He went looking for a real cat to work from and found a young mackerel tabby in the parking lot of the Bay Shore animal pound, which scratched him on the ride back to Grumman. The finished pose came from a lion cub in a cartoon book, with stripes added to make a tomcat of him. Tom Wood, who worked for Rodriguez, suggested putting him on the stars and stripes.

The F-14 first flew on 21 December 1970 at the Grumman plant in Calverton on Long Island. VF-1 Wolfpack and VF-2 Bounty Hunters stood up with it at NAS Miramar on 1 October 1972 and took it on its first deployment aboard USS Enterprise CVN-65 on 17 September 1974. On 19 August 1981 two VF-41 Black Aces F-14As flying from USS Nimitz CVN-68 shot down two Libyan Su-22s, and on 4 January 1989 two VF-32 Swordsmen jets from USS John F. Kennedy CV-67 downed two MiG-23s north of Tobruk. VF-84 Jolly Rogers made the first operational cruise with the TARPS reconnaissance pod in 1982, and the LANTIRN targeting pod later made the jet the Bombcat. The last F-14D combat missions launched from USS Theodore Roosevelt CVN-71 on 8 February 2006, flown by VF-213 Black Lions and VF-31 Tomcatters.

The patch is a circle with a curved tab hanging below it, edged all the way around in a royal blue merrowed border. White stars scatter across the blue upper field, and red and white stripes sweep across the lower half behind him. The cat is stitched in gray, black and white, grinning, leaning back with one leg kicked up and his striped tail curling out to the right. A tan gun belt crosses his hips with the holster hanging at his side. TOMCAT runs in black block letters across the gold tab, and the whole patch measures 3.75 inches wide by 4.5 inches tall with an iron-on backing.

The Tomcat was a two-seat airplane, and the pilot up front and the radar intercept officer in back won or lost every intercept together. Its AWG-9 radar could track 24 targets and guide AIM-54 Phoenix missiles against six of them at once. Miramar was Fightertown until the F-14 squadrons moved to NAS Oceana, Virginia, and Oceana is where the fleet said goodbye to the jet on 22 September 2006. Gandia also came up with the slogan Anytime Baby, a challenge aimed straight at the Air Force F-15 Eagle. Pilots, RIOs, plane captains and the maintainers who kept the jet up still wear the cat.

It sits well in a shadow box with squadron patches and a cruise book, and it fits a flight jacket or the vest that comes out for squadron reunions. It also makes a good gift for a RIO, a plane captain or a grandson who grew up on the stories. The iron-on backing goes down with a household iron, and a few stitches at the edge will keep it there for good. The cat has outlived the airplane by twenty years.