Word: trappings
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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...
...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...
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...
...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...
...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...