Of Mice And Me with due respect to John Steinbeck(Len Daniels) OF MICE AND ME
(with all due respect to John Steinbeck)


It was the fall of 1953 and I was working at the part-time job that was offered to me by the placement service at the technical school I was attending. It was at the Jefferson Medical College of Philadelphia. The Pathology Department needed a technical writer and draftsman to document the progress of their recent developments. They were involved with the final testing and proofing of the now famous Heart-Lung Machine that is presently being used in hospitals all over the world.

My job, along with 4 other technicians, was to make sense of and document all the electrical wiring and test results that had been scribbled down on little bits of paper, by the big engineers doing the design work. Every day, after school ended at 3:00 PM, I would walk to the hospital, which was about 2 miles away, and put in about three hours work, for the next six months. This was O.K. with me since they would also supply dinner and that's why I accepted the job.

It was a Friday night and I decided to try and finish up a drawing I had been working on. Everyone had left at 5 o'clock and the only people in the building were the hired janitorial crew. I could hear them vacuuming and moving the equipment on the various floors of the building. There were nine floors in this structure and I worked on the eighth, which was where the various laboratories were located.

At about 8 o'clock, I finally finished the project to my satisfaction, and decided to wrap it up, so I cleaned up and left my lab to walk out to the elevator about 75 feet away and around two corners. Most of the lights had already been extinguished and only the night-lights from the lab offices along the way were lit. In the dark silence, I remember hearing my footsteps on the hard concrete floor, which gave an eerie feeling on the path to the elevator. I had never worked this late before and having walked this way many times at an earlier hour of the day, I could do it blindfolded. This time, however, due to the lateness of the hour coupled with the time of year, late fall, I couldn't help myself from feeling a little uneasy walking through these deserted darkened hallways. My first thought was, if the elevators had been turned off, I would have to use the fire escape to get down the eight flights of steps to the outside, and I was sure that not all the doors would allow me egress. I figured, at worse I could always find a cleaning person who would know how to exit the building.

I had just turned the first corner, when I heard what could best be described as a gentle scratching sound about twenty feet ahead. I couldn't see too well in the dim light, but I could just barely make out the shape of a large square object by the door to one of the laboratories.
Upon closer inspection, I saw that someone had made a delivery to the lab and left it in the hall to be picked up. It was covered with a dark colored cloth, and I realized that the sound I heard was coming from it. At this point I knew that there must be something alive under that cloth. In the past, I had seen an assortment of animals being brought into this lab for various purposes, not all of which I'm sure the S.P.C.A. would condone, but I guess sacrifices must be made in the name of science. I just wondered what kind of creature would be brought into the lab this time that would never see the light of day again. Now my curiosity got the best of me. I just had to look under the cloth. I gingerly lifted it to find three large crate-shaped boxes, each housing a hundred, brand new, two week old, baby white mice. Once I lifted the cloth, they really began to move around in the boxes. I guessed most of them had been sleeping and now they thought this was their wake-up and play time.

There were little round holes cut in the sides of the boxes for ventilation, that were covered over with fine mesh screening, so that whatever was in the boxes couldn't escape through them.
I could see what looked like hundreds of pink noses and eyes looking out at me through these small orifices. It almost looked as though they were pleading to be let out of their makeshift prison. I also noticed on the boxes, in very big red letters, the words, "DANGER LIVE WHITE MICE - LABORATORY GRADE - HANDLE WITH CARE."
Looking at this warning, I thought, what in heaven's name could be dangerous about two week old, baby white mice?

I noticed that the lids on the boxes were only secured with several small twist-ties, the kind you see in the supermarket that are used to close your plastic bags containing produce. I would have to untwist one or two to get a peek into the box, so I did. The lid of the box was made of very sturdy cardboard so I had to remove almost all the ties to get it to flex enough to allow me to get a good look into this dangerous "den of demons" as the warning notice implied.

I gently lifted one corner about an inch or so, peeked in, and was greeted with one small mouse that happily jumped out and landed on the floor, then scurried quickly down the hall. I chased it, trying to outrun it and when I finally caught it, I turned around to walk back to the box and noticed that four more mice had gotten out. Evidently, in my haste, I hadn't replaced the lid securely and left just a sliver of an opening through which the four had gotten out. My dilemma at this point was, do I go and close the lid properly, or do I chase down the recent escapees. I knew that if I chose to retrieve those four, that even more would escape, and if I went to close the lid, the four would crawl through the openings under the doors that lined this hallway, and I would never get them if they got behind those locked doors. I took my chances with the lid. While I was putting the one mouse I had picked up back through the lid opening, a few more jumped out and once again I gave chase to try to pick them all up. It seemed that every time I put two or three back, another three or four would jump out. I realized this called for a major decision; otherwise I might be there all night, so I retrieved the ones I could and quickly dropped them back in the box, all the while grabbing the ones trying to escape again. I looked around to see several go under an office door never to be seen again.

I quickly reattached the bands and replaced the cloth cover with a sigh of relief. When I turned to proceed toward the elevator, I saw two of the little buggers come out under one office door and quickly run under another door. I thought to myself, surely, they'll never miss five or six white mice out of three hundred. As I walked, I wondered what each of the offices was going to be like come Monday morning. It definitely wasn't going to be "the same old, same old."

I rang for the elevator, and lo and behold it came up with a janitor holding a vacuum cleaner, and with a very surprised look on his face, asked me what I was doing there so late. I told him I had a very important job to finish and now I was going home. As we descended, we talked small talk about the weather and such, never hinting about my adventures with those mice. I don't think he would have believed me anyway.

All the way home I kept thinking that now I know the reason for the warning labels on those boxes, and every so often I think that maybe, just maybe, the descendants of those tiny little troublemakers might still be running around the halls of that hospital.

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