SURPLUS PROPERTY: Mouse House

SURPLUS PROPERTY Mouse House

Among the hundreds of war plants the Reconstruction Finance Corp. is trying hard to peddle is a strange and relatively inexpensive one: an air-controlled, glass-bricked mouse house at New City, N.Y. Cost: $150,000.

The 9,000-sq. ft. New City plant was built in the earlier days of the war, when laboratory mice for the processing of tropical-disease serum were desperately scarce in the U.S. Government joined forces with industrv—which in this case turned out to be professional mouse breeders Frederic G. Carnochan and C. N. Wentworth Cumming. They already had a plant at New City. With Government aid, production zoomed from some 5,000 to 15,000 mice a week (price: 25¢ a mouse). Old. blue-blooded European strains, in danger of war extermination, were crated, bedded down on peanut shells, and flown to New City. By mid-1944, the famine was licked. By 1945, cutbacks were ordered, although specialized shortages still existed.

Last week, despite its excellent war record, the New City mouse house had no takers (although present operators hold an option to buy). There were reasons: 1) the building has certain mouse-imposed quirks of design; 2) mouse odor is much harder to overcome than a mouse shortage.