In Iowa: The Mice Aren't Telling

By Roberto Suro

The janitor at the Audubon, Iowa, high school, A.E. ("Brick") Kness, used to watch mice with a hunter's eye. For a while he even allowed them to nibble contentedly in the lunchroom just so he could study their weaknesses. Brick Kness was not going to resort to easy or familiar solutions. This was the Roaring Twenties. When Americans did things right in those days, they invented something new to do it with.

When his magic moment finally came, Brick Kness fused knowledge of mouse and machine into a grand idea, cheap, original and efficient. The end result was not merely a footnote to the history of technology, it was the founding of a family dynasty.

Just last summer three of Brick Kness's grandchildren took over management of the multimillion-dollar corporation that now produces what everybody in Albia, Iowa (pop. 4,000), simply refers to as "the trap." The young Knesses are remarkably similar to their elders. The invention has been handed down from father to son not merely as a business but as a way of life.

Last year the Kness Manufacturing Co. sold 400,000 traps and grossed about $1.5 million at a wholesale average of $3.75 a trap. It was the twelfth straight year that production has increased. While there are not enough zeroes in these figures to dazzle anyone on Wall Street, they are remarkable in Albia. All the more so because the Knesses, defying the collective wisdom of American commerce, neither advertise nor employ salesmen to bring the trap to their customers.

In the 1870s, before modern marketing and packaging had been developed, Ralph Waldo Emerson prophesied: "If a man write a better book, preach a better sermon or make a better mousetrap than his neighbor, though he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door."

There is no doubt that the Knesses make a better mousetrap. But ask a gathering of Knesses what makes it better, and you'll mostly get head scratching. Corn-belt born and bred, they are not given to long explanations. Eventually a young nephew says, "There's one unique thing that makes it special, and it would take an outsider years to figure out." Though no one is certain if a trade secret is involved, they decide not to discuss it further. Instead, a concise summary is offered: "There's mechanics there, good practical mechanics. But there's magic too."

The magic would seem to lie in the way the trap lures mice to their doom without a particle of cheese or any other bait. The trap is just a little shorter than a shoe box and is made of galvanized sheet metal. The potential victim sees what appears to be a narrow tunnel open at both ends. Curiosity stirs. He enters. In the center of the box he hits a trip concealed in the floor of the tunnel. Whoosh, clatter, and a paddle sweeps the mouse into captivity. The Knesses have made a number of small changes in the original design. Yet the shape of the openings has always remained an elongated oval, something like a human eye. Is this the secret? "Truth is, we don't know," says Brick's son Mike. "The mice aren't telling."

The Knesses, in fact, are still recovering from a recent attempt to improve the trap. In order to save money they contracted with a plastics company to pro duce a small butterfly-shaped part used to wind up the spring-powered paddle. The quality of the material varied, and some winding keys broke. Standing by the company's absolute lifetime guarantee, the Knesses, with no outside legal prodding, not only replaced the traps that broke but sent new ones with the traditional metal part to all 60,000 people who had bought a potentially defective product. This experience reinforced the already strong urge among the mousetrap makers to leave nothing for others to mess up.

Instead of trying to improve on what they call "the world's best mousetrap," the Knesses are now concentrating on making a smaller model more suited for residential use. Brick's trap, retailing for $8.95, is too large and expensive for a householder with a minor mouse problem. As a result, most traps go to nationwide exterminating companies and large distributors who market the traps to grain elevators and other food handlers. Professional mice catchers love the trap because it can be wound up and just left in a likely spot. With one full wind, it has been known to captivate up to 15 mice overnight. The mice are not injured and can be released unharmed. Humane trappers have been known to release batches of mice near the houses of people with whom they have a score to settle.

Nevertheless, the world took its time beating a path to the Knesses' door. When Brick made the first trap 55 years ago, he was a widower with six children. He stayed on at the high school for several years before he could risk full-time work with the trap and other inventions. Then the Depression hit, and like millions of others, he had to make ends meet by doing anything that paid. But whenever there was a little cash around the house, Brick would go back to his workroom.

When Brick's three sons, Mike, Lester and Arnold, came back from World War II, the family moved to Albia, some 65 miles southeast of Des Moines, and set up a factory in an old barn. Five railroads then intersected in town, making it a likely place for manufacturing. (Other captains of industry did not flock to Albia, however, and two of the railroads are now gone.) When orders were down, as they often were, the Knesses built houses. They farmed and did some landscaping. They installed toilets and dug septic tanks. They fixed almost any machine that needed fixing. Up through the mid-1960s sales stayed consistently mediocre. Then the Federal Government began restricting the use of poisons for pest control around food. Emerson looked down from the heavens and smiled. A decade ago, the Kness Manufacturing Co. had four employees who with the owners managed a daily output of 60 traps. Now 28 workers turn out 2,500 mousetraps a day.

"No one of us alone would have made it," says Mike, recalling the years he, Lester, 60, and Arnold, 56, struggled to keep the trap going. "Each of us faltered at times, but then the others were there to help. Teamwork isn't easy. We learned it out of necessity." Four years ago, Brick's old barn got too small for the growing business. The family decided to construct a new factory and pretty much built it themselves. Brick died of Parkinson's disease just after the decision was made. He never saw the new place, but he would have liked the way it was put up.

That new factory is one of the few signs of Kness prosperity. Members of the clan do not build big houses or take trips to Europe. A "good time" is still defined as a fishing trip or a full bag of quail at the end of a day's hunting. When the three brothers decided to pull out of the company's day-to-day operations, they briefly considered hiring a general manager.

The notion was rejected, Mike explains, because "an experienced person coming in here just wouldn't be able to under stand it. Besides, we wanted to keep things in the family." The idea of anointing just one of the young Knesses as boss also had drawbacks. "If we'd made any one of the boys general manager and turned him loose, there'd have been conflicts." In stead, the elder Knesses decided to pass along their own managerial troika--as well as a set of rules to make it work. Kerry, 26, Russ, 26, and Paul, 25, each have a distinct area of responsibility so none can boss the others.

A Kness rule, "No advice unless someone asks for it," is balanced by "Every decision is unanimous." Each Monday at 9 a.m., the three meet to report their activities and make plans. "We keep each other in check by asking questions," Russ says. Keeping an eye on all three is Gerry Mosbey, 46, a mousetrap maker for 25 years who has an equal voice in the management. Mosbey will become part of the family soon. Kerry is engaged to his daughter Rhonda.

"No one ever pressured us to come back here to Albia," Russ says. Asked why he did, he explains, "There's a kind of a tie to the trap. It's pride in what the family has accomplished, in the quality of the product."

The path to the Knesses' door may have been beaten simply because of the Ketch-All Automatic Mouse Trap, Patent No. 2433913. But Emerson suggested an additional reason for this family's success: "Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing."

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