"Tabby Manna"

When a cat catches a mouse, that is not news. But if a mouse should tree a cat, editors would smite their thighs.

Newsgatherers who last week rushed to Bakersfield, Calif., and vicinity, caused countrywide journalistic thigh-smiting. They put

Rodentia on the front pages as only the Pied Piper* or Arch bishop Hatto Il/- could have done. It was not a migration of lemmings (TIME, Jan. 10) that they had to report, but an incredible multitude of common field and house mice, driven from their cosy holes in vineyards of the dry Vista Lake basin by heavy rains and by a great herd of sheep turned out to graze where grain had grown before.

"Like unrolling carpets ... so thick that in places the ground itself seemed to crawl forward in a grey mass," wrote eyewitnesses. "Tenderhearted" motorists were halted on the highways by the creeping hordes. More brutal drivers forged ahead, until they "skidded and were blocked" by masses of living and dead mice. Every front door in the lowlands of Kern County was reported to be shut fast, housewives staying within, men climbing out their windows to give battle. In the oil fields, workmen awoke to find their shacks alive with squeaking, gnawing rodents. Shoes were nibbled to shreds; socks were like lace; shirts and trousers in tatters. "One man couldn't find his clothes at all."

Work in the oil fields came to a halt. Derricks and donkey engines were crawling with mice. Reservoirs and pipelines were clogged with drowned bodies. And still the mice came, endlessly advancing, followed by wheeling, crying flocks of birds great and small --hawks, vultures, owls, magpies, jays, even (according to the Associated Press) wild ducks which, seldom carnivorous (except for fish), must presumably have mistaken the undulating carpet of rodents for a grey lake. Running amuck in the tumbling, whispering, squeaking herds went coyotes and wildcats; even a wolf was seen. But mankind had warred too well upon the natural enemies of mousedom* in Kern County. The mouse millions marched on.

The human inhabitants of Kern County declared a mouse war. It was with joy indescribable that the newsgatherers learned the name of the mouse catcher the U. S. Biological Survey was sending--one S. E. Piper. They played up this coincidence for all it was worth, longing to call Houseman Piper "pied" but realizing that the slang connotationf would be slanderous.

Public-spirited citizens starved their cats. Municipal officials starved cats in the village pounds --and an army of ravenous felines was released upon Mousedom. To no avail. Krazy Kat himself (or herself)** could have been no more ineffectual. Dick Whittington's cat, who rid an African kingdom of rats at one fell swoop, might have prevailed, but not the cats of Kern County. Rocking with glee, the newsgatherers told stories about cowardly cats fleeing to cover, proud cats ignoring such easy prey, big-hearted cats adopting families of mice. The ever-colorful New York World carried a report of one cat who added 16 mice to her litter of kittens. The World headline read: "Cats . . . Scorn Tons of Mice as Tabby Manna."

The men of Kern County at last got out their plows and strewed deep furrows with poisoned grain. Then they got wheelbarrows, stacked the mouse corpses in pyres and the funeral smoke of myriad mice plumed the lowlands. They died, it was estimated, at the rate of 1,000 for every 75 feet of trench, per day. Gunfire and chlorine gas helped stem the tide but not for four days were the mice officially declared beaten.

The country swallowed the story, with a prodigious grain of salt. People wondered why, while they were about it, newsgatherers had not invented a Moses of Mousedom, leading his people to a promised land and handing down commandments nibbled upon a pebble. Or an Alexander, weeping mousily when there were no more ranches to conquer. Or some evidence that it had rained mice, or that the rodents were from Mars, or--since a mouse running from beneath a woman's skirt used to be regarded as a symbol of unchastity--that the mouse army was a portentous sign of the times.

To Kern Countyites the mice were, however, no laughing matter. The invasion, which began a month ago, had devastated 100 square miles. Three big oil companies had dug 26 miles of trenches. Horticulture Commissioner Whit C. Barber of California estimated the total property damage at $10,000.

In Texas, inspired by his California colleagues, an Associated Press correspondent telegraphed: "Bullfrogs migrating from one swamp to another caused a traffic jam on a highway near Houston . . . almost impossible to get through."

Hearstlings

The Court of Appeals of Maryland sat last week to consider the case of three Hearstling editors and two Hearstling photographers, sentenced last summer by a Baltimore judge for taking and publishing pictures of Murderer Richard Whittemore against the express order of the court. The Court of Appeals unanimously upheld the Baltimore Judge (Eugene O'Dunne). The Hearstlings had pleaded that they placed their duty to their newspapers and to their public ("People who think") above the orders of the court. Judge O'Dunne had said, in passing sentence: "As the dignified affairs of the legal forum were shifted to the commerce of the street for the benefit of the Hearst International Reel Corp. . . . it is expected that the syndicate . . . will pay the fine." The fine was $5,000, imposed on Harold Elliston, onetime managing editor of the Baltimore Neivs who also faced a day in jail. Managing Editor Earl C. Deland of the Baltimore American was given a day's jailing; also City Editor Harry Clark of the News, and Photographers Sturm and Klemm.

*Of Hameln (not Hamlin) Germany, which, says legend, was plagued with rats in 1284. A strange piper in motley lured the beasts into the Weser where they drowned. Thinking him a sorcerer, the citizens refused him his pay, whereupon he piped the children of Hameln all away, "into a mountain." Possible basis of truth: the 13th Century Children's Crusade.

/-In 969, says legend, famine visited Bingen (on the Rhine). Hatto, the Archbishop, had a full granary. The populace clamored for him to share it with them. He bade them enter his barn, where he burned them all up "like the rats you are." That night as Hatto sat down to a glutton's feast at his table, fierce rats assailed him in droves. He fled on horseback, rowed to a tower in the middle of the Rhine, locked himself in. There the rats followed and devoured him. Poet Southey celebrated this event in "God's judgment upon a Wicked Bishop."

*In one year a single pair of mice can have 16,146 descendants.

/-"Pied": blind drunk. Origin: among typesetters, from the verb "pi" meaning to disorganize hopelessly, as a "pied" line of type: cmfw shrdl cmfwy vbgkq etao ET The original "pied" Piper was so-called from his motley costume.

**Black, saucer-eyed partner of Ignatz Mouse in the most popular U. S. comic strip, created by Cartoonist George Herriman. Krazy, with a Yiddish accent, is the butt of Ignatz' jokes, scorn and occasional fury. Stupid, gullible, the victim of his (or her) own good nature and Ignatz' spite, Krazy, whose gender fluctuates with Cartoonist Herriman's whim, usually leaves the scene unconscious, propelled by the impact of & well-aimed brick from Ignatz.