Stories about Duke the Mouse first started appearing during the school year of 1987-88. I was working at an after (and before) school program for children in Tucson, Arizona and I thought it would be fun to buy a mouse for the center.

Mice are pretty cheap so I bought one and figured I'd keep it in an old bird cage. I put the rodent in the cage and before I could even close the door, the mouse was sitting on top of the cage, looking at me.

Frankly, I was surprised. No, make that STUNNED! How did that boy get out so quickly? Later I read that mice can flatten their bodies and squeeze through a space 1/8 of an inch thick. Since the bars on the bird cage were about 1/2 an inch apart, three additional mice could have been riding on that mouse's shoulders and they could still waltz through the bars, no problem.

Before I could get my wits together and grab the mouse, he slipped off the top of the cage and dashed behind the refrigerator. I spent the next hour trying to take the appliance apart looking for anything furry. No luck.

Well, life is cheap and so are mice. I bought another one and put it in an old aquarium. It died suddenly at the child care facility after one of those three day weekends. So, I got another (mistake #4) and that worked out all right until one day the director asked, "What stinks in here?" As I said, life is cheap so I set the boy free and wished him luck out in the desert. I never heard from him again so I assumed that he lived to a ripe old
age and might still be enjoying his twilight years in the Arizona warmth.

Each day just before school started, the children who came early to the Before-School-Program lined up to get on the bus. I usually told them a few stories while we were lining up and one day I told them
about my mouse. To make it a little more interesting, I added a few details. Before long, the details grew. And grew. Finally the kids wouldn't get on the bus without hearing about my mouse.

One boy in particular loved to ask me about my mouse. His name was Kenny and he was about seven years. That's all I remember about him except that he would come up with these off-the-wall questions. As I made up the answers he would laugh and laugh and laugh. It was always fun telling stories to Kenny.

At this time (still 1988-89 in case you've dozed off here) my mouse didn't have a name. I just wanted it to be a mouse with an attitude and no marketing department.

During the summer of 1988 I worked at Camp Gwynn Valley. This was my 8th summer and by this time I figured out that the easiest job in the place would be as editor of the camp newspaper. Since we didn't have a camp newspaper I suggested it and the owners, Howie and Betty Boyd, took the bait.

I began publishing the Tajar Times that summer. It was a hoot but I remember that the first issue was a little thin. As the deadline approached, I cranked out a story about a mouse. As I was typing the story I was also trying to come up with a name that suggested brute strength, hypocrisy, anti-intellectualism and a certain amount of macho swagger. I named my puny mouse in honor of John "The Duke" Wayne with the hopes that
children reading the stories wouldn't repeat his folly. I remember that I needed to fill one more line of space so I threw in the phrase "...and that's the way it is with Duke." As you can tell from these stories, it has stuck.

Over the past ten years (plus or minus), I've written and told hundreds of stories about Duke the Mouse. I've gotten to know him well. I'm glad to say that other writers--adults as well as children--have written lots of stories about that mouse, too.