Happy ending: From pests to pets
By AMY CALDER
Staff Writer Kennebec Journal & Morning Sentinel
WATERVILLE -- Bill Exner has emerged the winner in the man versus mouse contest.
This weekend, he caught two mice he believes carted off his false teeth to their home behind the wall last week.
"There he is -- that's the culprit," Exner said Monday at his home on Oakland Street. "That's the one who carried off my teeth."
Exner was peering into a glass aquarium he bought at Kmart to house the two rodents he had been trying to trap for several days because they were making scratching noises inside his bedroom wall.
He was pointing to a plump gray and brown field mouse with big ears and a white belly. It jumped to the top of the aquarium and hung upside down from a screen as the smaller one -- also brown and gray -- nibbled on a piece of bread.
Exner, 68, had caught a mouse three times last week and put it in a gallon-sized pickle jar, only to have it escape each time.
One night he went to bed and was too tired to put his lower dentures in the bathroom as he usually does, so he placed them on his nightstand.
The next morning they were gone, and he said he knew right away it was a mouse that took them.
He and his future-son-in-law, Eric Holt, sawed through the wall and found the false teeth. Oakland's animal control officer, Patrick Faucher, convinced Exner that it probably took two mice to haul off the teeth, with one pushing and one pulling, as they do in cartoons.
"I named these little guys 'Push' and 'Pull,' " Exner said Monday. "I got that from Pat. He said one would probably push and one would pull."
Exner's original plan was to trap the mice and take them to the country and set them free, but in the short time he has held them prisoner, he has taken a shine to them.
"I'm keeping them," he said. "They're not going anywhere. I'm not going to take them to a field. They're better off in here. They got water and food. We don't have any pets, and they're not any bother."
"After I caught them I started looking at them, you know, and I put my finger in there and Pull let me scratch his head and belly and everything. I started feeding him by hand and he's pretty tame."
Exner and his wife, Shirley, have been bombarded by phone calls since the story of their mouse pursuit appeared Saturday in the Morning Sentinel. Television and radio reporters want to meet them; one woman in Lacrosse, Wisc., wants to adopt the mice, according to Bill Exner.
"She said she lived in an apartment building and she saw the article and everyone was laughing at it," he said.
Exner also is getting some ribbing from his friends at the Waterville Elks Lodge.
"I walked in there and one guy said, 'Here comes Mr. Mouse. Where's the mice? Where's your teeth?' That's what I heard all day. One guy gave me this," Exner said, producing a Mickey Mouse coloring book.
Exner likes to collect things such as model cars, plastic birds that talk and anything having to do with SpongeBob Square-Pants. His house is a museum of sorts.
"I'm a rat-packer," he says with a smile.
Amy Calder -- 861-9247
acalder@centralmaine.com
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Here's the photo that goes with it:
Staff photo by Jim Evans
Bill Exner has captured the mice he believes took his dentures and has decided to keep them as pets.
retrieved 3/27/2007 from: http://morningsentinel.mainetoday.com/news/local/3752411.html
