Word: knesses
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...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...
...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...