Paterson cat toy company employs halfway house residents

PATERSON – After working for years as a tow truck mechanic, Tony Uvenio was skeptical when his employment counselor set up a job interview for him at a city business that makes items to keep cats occupied.

“Are you serious?” Uvenio, 33, of Roxbury recalled wondering. He thought the company made toys for cats. That didn’t sound like the right place for him.

But then Uvenio did some thinking. He was living at the Straight and Narrow halfway house in Paterson as part of his drug court sentence. The program requires its clients to have jobs, and guys without jobs get sent back to jail.

Uvenio had just served five months at the Essex County Correctional Facility on a heroin conviction and he didn’t want to go back. So he went on the interview at the cat company.

That was two months ago. Since then, Uvenio has become an enthusiastic employee at CatTrees.com. The teasing he gets from the other guys at the halfway house doesn’t bother him. In fact, Uvenio has bought into the concept of the business to the point that he even designed his own version of a cat scratcher that he calls the Sisal Seesaw. He said he is worried that someone might steal his idea if he reveals the details.

In a city with too many stories of failure, the tale unfolding at CatTrees.com seems to offer a glimmer of hope.

“I can’t give you perfect, but everybody in our program is working on themselves,” said Patricia Rizzo, an employment counselor at Straight and Narrow. “They’re rebuilding their lives.”

“She saw the determination in me and how much I wanted a job,” said another client from Straight and Narrow, Thomas Rivers, 37, of Newark.

Employment obstacles

Rizzo, a retired Paterson schoolteacher, runs into obstacles in trying finding work for men with criminal convictions living in a halfway house. Sometimes there’s no transportation. Sometimes the hours don’t fit the schedules of her clients, who must report for probation regularly or return to jail. Often employers simply aren't interested in taking a chance on someone with a criminal background.

“We went on all these interviews and we got shot down,” Rizzo said of her efforts on behalf of Uvenio and Rivers. “The guys started to give up. But my job is to keep pushing them and give them encouragement.”

Rizzo learned through a posting on the internet that CatTrees.com was looking to hire someone. The company was less than a mile from Straight and Narrow on Lindbergh Place. Walking distance.

Rizzo took Uvenio and Rivers to meet with the company's co-owner, Jeff Schindle. They said they were honest about the troubles in their past.

“I told him where I’ve been, where I am now and where I’m going,” Uvenio said.

“I got a good vibe from them,” Schindle said. “I decided to give an opportunity to some guys who don’t get many.”

At the time, Schindle was looking for one worker, someone with experience handling power tools who could assemble the CatTrees.com line of products. But Schindle saw how badly the two men wanted the job. He said he couldn’t pick one, so he hired both men. He had nothing but praise for the work they have done so far.

Helping keep cats busy

Uvenio and Rivers perform a variety of tasks at CatTrees.com, where they are part of a crew of three employees. They slice recycled paper rolls into sections used to construct the merchandise. They cut sheets of sisal — the fibrous material that cats seem to love to scratch — into pieces for assembly.

Every day, they make by hand dozens of the standard model sofa-saver, cat-scratch prevention pieces along with more elaborate specialty items like the Puss in Bunk Beds and Whiskers’ Window Perch and Play Tube.

“I can do a Couch Corner in seven minutes,” Uvenio said, attesting to his mastery of the job.

Schindle has been flexible in allowing the two men to work their 40-hour weeks around their probation appointments. “We’re building cat scratchers,” he said, explaining his willingness to work with the two men’s schedules. “It’s not life-and-death.”

The two employees expressed their gratitude for Schindle. “He’s a stand-up guy, real down-to-earth,” Rivers said. “He could have turned us away. But he gave us the benefit of the doubt.”

Uvenio said he is to leave Straight and Narrow at the end of the month, and Rivers soon after that. Schindle said he would keep both men on the payroll after they leave the halfway house. Uvenio said he would commute from Morris County, while Rivers and his girlfriend plan to live together in an apartment in Paterson’s 1st Ward.

Neither man is making any grand pronouncements about his life. Both have multiple convictions on their records. They know what it’s like to hit the streets with the best intentions after completing a jail sentence only to end up in handcuffs again.

Rivers said he plans to avoid his old neighborhood in Newark. “In Paterson, I don’t know people,” he said. “I’m not known.”

Uvenio said he had been clean from heroin for almost eight years before a relapse landed him back in jail. He said he thinks he learned from that experience and is looking forward to continuing work at CatTrees.com.

“I’m excited about it,” he said.