Close-Up : Mild-Mannered Inventor, 85, Is the Man Bixby Knolls Rats Fear Most

In Kie Bumgarner’s backyard last week, orange-laden branches drooped toward the ground; pale green leaves clustered on a nearby bottleneck tree; gardening equipment was arranged neatly on an outdoor shelf. And dangling from one of the power lines that converge on his Tudor-style house was the stiffened corpse of a 12-inch gray rat.

“Caught him night before last,” Bumgarner said with satisfaction.

The Bumgarner elevated wire-supported rodent trap, U.S. Patent 4477997, had apparently struck again.

At 85, with horn-rimmed bifocals, a hearing aid and gray-blond, combed-back hair, the trap’s inventor hardly looks like a killer. But Bumgarner estimates he has claimed more than 100 victims in his crusade to clear the rats from his corner of Bixby Knolls--the middle-class, west-central Long Beach neighborhood where he has lived for 30 years.

Has Hired an Attorney

He successfully has kept the rodents away from his home and the two adjacent houses since he started tinkering with his contraption in 1982. In October, Bumgarner received his patent papers. In December, City Health Officer Rugmini Shah wrote in a memo that “we would certainly recommend the device.” And now, Bumgarner has hired an attorney to contact manufacturers to see if they would be interested in producing his better rattrap.

The trap is specially made to attach to power lines or tree limbs--highways and byways for roof rats, who travel them after dusk to feast on avocados, oranges and tomatoes in the yards and gardens of residential neighborhoods all over Southern California. Then the rats use the lines to reach holes and cracks in house eaves, hunkering down between ceiling and roof for their daytime naps.

On the surface, Bumgarner’s innovation seems simple. He mounted a commercial rattrap on a piece of wood. He placed two prongs on the bottom to secure the trap on a power line or limb. And he put the whole thing on a pole, so he can lift and lower the trap. That way, he can stand on the ground while placing the trap in position or removing it.

The rats are stopped before they can enter the dwelling. Easy.

Still, “there’s more to it than you think,” Bumgarner said. He worked for months to perfect it.

It was a termite inspector who first drew Bumgarner’s attention to the rat problem--and to its solution.

The inspector was making his annual check of Bumgarner’s house. “He was up past the ceiling, inside the roof,” Bumgarner recalled, “and he said, ‘You sure have rats up here.’ ”

Bumgarner had had no inkling that he and his wife, Laura, had house guests. He had never seen a live rat in Bixby Knolls.

‘Everybody Hates Rats’

He was horrified. “Yes, I sure was,” he said. “I don’t like ‘em around. Oh no, everybody hates rats.”

The inspector showed Bumgarner the power lines leading to ventilator holes under the roof. That was the entryway, the inspector said.

Bumgarner’s first reaction was to call the Long Beach Health Department. The department’s advice: Come by for some rat poison.

But Bumgarner didn’t go for that. “I don’t like to put out poison--cats and dogs all around here,” he said. “So I just got busy and made a little trap.”

He remembered the termite inspector’s lecture. If the rats were coming in on the lines, Bumgarner decided, that was where he should place the traps.

The first Bumgarner elevated wire-supported rodent trap was a makeshift affair. He nailed a rattrap he’d bought for $1.59 to a broom handle. He used two pieces of wire for the prongs.

The first night, he caught a rat.

He soon figured out one drawback to his improved trap. A broom handle is made of wood, which could conduct electricity from a high voltage power line. “After you killed the rat, you could kill yourself taking it down,” he said.

Invention Grew More Sophisticated

So he made four more traps, each one a little more sophisticated than the last. He used polyvinyl chloride, a non-conducting plastic, instead of a broom handle. And he used plastic for the prongs.

Instead of nailing the whole thing together, he used screws.

He put the four traps out. He caught four rats in one night.

“I figured I had something then,” Bumgarner said. “And I thought of a patent.

“I was catching so many of them and it was easy. And there are rats all over this area. They say San Pedro is full of them. And Palos Verdes, they’re all over that hill.”

He had thought about patenting an invention just once before, more than 50 years earlier, when he was working for a Texas oil refinery. “I had a nice little cigarette roller. It was just a little flat old thing,” he said.

But while he was on vacation in his home state of Missouri, Bumgarner received a telegram from his employer. The refinery was closing; he should hurry to the Long Beach, California, plant if he wanted a position there.

“I just forgot about the cigarette roller,” Bumgarner said. “It was the Depression and I was just glad to have a job.”

This time, though, he followed through on his patent plans. He hired a draftsman and a lawyer, filing his application in February, 1983.

In the meantime, he kept quiet. He didn’t want anyone to steal his idea.

He told only Ed Sheeran, his neighbor to the north. Sheeran had a rat problem, too, and Bumgarner decided to hang a few traps in his friend’s yard to help out.

“The next morning, there was a rat in the trap. I dumped it right in the garbage,” Sheeran remembered last week from his seat at Bumgarner’s kitchen table. Then, turning to Bumgarner, he added: “And you told me you didn’t want me to do that; you wanted me to save it so you could take pictures. If my wife saw it, she would have been so upset.”

Respect for Rats

In the ensuing months, Bumgarner developed a grudging respect for his quarry. He found victims in traps he placed between loops in the wires. And he caught one rat by the tail, so he assumes it was walking backward.

“They must be acrobatic little devils,” he mused.

Since he received his patent--the exclusive right to manufacture and market the trap for the next 17 years--he has felt free to spread the news about his achievement.

Responses have mostly been a mixture of admiration, affection and disgust.

“Dearest Kie,” wrote Bumgarner’s sister, Helen Cobb, from her Missouri home, “Was not surprised to hear that you had a patent. But my big surprise was you had rats!”