Amid Knickknacks and Stray Cats, She Displayed Her Faith in People

People used to tap on the window, wondering whether Chester was real. Chester was a 20-pound orange tabby who more or less adopted the Unique gift shop in Old Town Alexandria and made it his private domain.

He had been abandoned until he found his way to Ethel Beun, the owner of Unique, who spent a lifetime offering a helping hand to any creature -- feline, canine or human -- who might need it. Ms. Beun (pronounced Bewn) had opened Unique in 1969 and over the years transformed it from an import shop specializing in South American textiles to a general antiques and gift store.

"It's kind of like a grown-up's dime store," said store manager Cindy Collegeman, who has worked at Unique for almost 35 years. "When I first walked in here, I felt I had gone to another dimension. There were thousands of things hanging from the ceiling, all kinds of whimsy and sweet things."

One of the things Ms. Beun thought her store needed was a resident cat, which is how Chester found a home at Unique. He particularly liked to curl up in the King Street display window, where he would open his eyes and stretch just when passersby were convinced he was part of the permanent decor.

"Chester became the master of the building," said Brenda Reese, one of Ms. Beun's employees and friends. "He had a cult following. He got mail from other countries."

Chester made countless two-legged and four-legged friends and inspired Ms. Beun to organize a feline adoption agency called King Street Cats. She set aside a room above her store as a shelter, where 20 or more cats await adoption at any given time. Since its founding in 1997, her group has found homes for more than 1,000 abandoned cats.

"She not only took in stray cats, she took in stray people," said Reese, a onetime president of King Street Cats.

It was a generosity of spirit that Ms. Beun developed early in life. She was born Ethel Mary Dancho in the northern New Jersey town of Singac and was 8 when her mother died. She had to grow up fast, managing the household and cooking for her father and younger sister.

After high school, she moved west to ease a chronic case of eczema and worked her way through the University of Arizona. In 1962, she moved to Peru, where her first husband worked for the U.S. Agency for International Development.

While there, she started a nursery and day-care center for the children of impoverished farmworkers. A Washington Post article from 39 years ago today described Ms. Beun's "tough determination and pioneer inventiveness" as she "rolled up her sleeves" to convert an old chicken coop into a haven for children.

"Within a year," the article said, "Ethel Beun's day nursery . . . was dealing out daily doses of hope, food, vitamins and medicine."

"She always thought that kindness mattered," her daughter, Jennifer Rohrbach, said last week. "She would always try to find the good in things."