This is a reposting of an earlier story. I have many new subscribers who I hope to encourage to look back on my homepage to choose from the more than 130 postings they may have missed..

Wikepedia photo of a Stearman biplane trainer modified to serve as a crop
duster, a very common sight at aerial fairs and over farm fields in America
during the interwar years after World War II. Cheap and durable, they were
the choice of many pilots bent on earning a living in the air. These same trainers
were used to train British pilots in the U.S. during the lead up to the Battle of Britain.

In the summer of 1949, I turned seven and on visits to my grandparents, I was free to roam around the town of Vashti. Most days it was too hot to do much in the middle of the day. The dogs would not stir from the shade beneath the house. Dry! It was so dry that great clouds of red dust billowed from the occasional car that passed by on the dirt road in front of Pop and Momma’s house, coating the house and even the insides if the front windows were left open. 

Cotton was high in the fields across the road and the tractors that plowed the great fields around Vashti had done their early morning work long before midday. Momma and I took refuge in the kitchen for lunch and were eating a banana sandwich on light bread and drinking grape Kool-aide, when I heard the mounting drone of an airplane. It was coming closer and I scrambled outdoors, the screen door slamming behind me, to watch it pass over.

I was a boy of the war. We ate and slept, fighting the war over and over. We knew most of the army infantry divisional shoulder patches by heart. I had collected all the army insignia printed inside the Royal Crown Soda bottle caps. Our fathers’ divisional army patches were sewn on our school jackets. We could name the American fighter planes we saw in the newsreels and John Wayne movies, the fast P-51 Mustangs, the gull-winged Corsairs that took off from aircraft carriers, the twin fuselage P-38 long-range fighters..  But what we saw most of the time in real life were the bi-winged Stearman trainers that had been converted into crop dusters after the war. 

This one passed close above the treetops of the pecan orchard, and half a mile away, banked against a pine thicket, leveled off, and dropped down until its landing gear nearly touched the rows of cotton. A white cloud trailed behind it as it came directly toward me, skimming across a hundred acres of cotton in bright, noonday sun.

The Stearman roared overhead, and powdery insecticide fell on me, dusting my clothes and hair. Momma came running down the steps to tell me my face was as white as Martha White flour. She laughed to see even my eyelashes were snow white.  As the Stearman banked for its second run across the Harrison place, it showed its full topside, and I realized the entire trainer had been painted a gleaming silver. These old planes, entirely covered in only canvas, were originally yellow, but that paint did not last well and the metallic silver paint would last, even on the canvas skin, although it also added a good hundred pounds to the old girl’s weight.  As the plane came toward me again, I could see the pilot, wearing flight overalls and googles, and he could see me standing on the edge of the field, arms raised, hands waving.

Again, the trail of white powder gushed from the plane as the pilot leveled off just above the cotton plants. I was so excited I was shouting and jumping up and down, hoping somehow the pilot would see me, wave to me.

As I fanned my face in the storm of powdery chemicals, I turned in time to see him dip first one wing, banking for the third time, for another pass overhead. Distracted, he did not see the electrical wire draped from pole to pole near the road and as he dropped down to spread his insecticide, a wingtip just traced the wire, causing the plane to turn slightly as it the glanced off at a slight angle,  then slide through the air a quarter turn sideways for a second or two. My heart stopped and I held my breath as I watched the pilot struggle to right the plane.

This was breathtaking for a boy of seven and the excitement was repeated over and over during the next few minutes until the pilot was satisfied that he had done what he was paid to do, no more and no less.

When Pop came home from the tractor garage, it always took him a while to get cleaned up, using Lava Soap to get the black grease and oil stains off his hands and arms. Then, over supper, he told me all about how the poison killed boll weevils, insects that had damaged a lot of cotton crops before the war, how cotton had made a comeback because of DDT. And besides, it pretty much got rid of all the mosquitoes, at least for a week or two.

Talk about mosquitoes reminded Pop that he wanted to show me something in the metal kitchen cabinet. He got out a box labeled “Quinine.” And, there was a second box filled with empty capsules. Pop showed me how these could be filled with quinine powder. You were supposed to take these to ward off malaria which was spread by mosquitoes. He said no one had come down with malaria since the swamps were drained during President Roosevelt’s time as president. Pop loved Franklin Roosevelt. Before Roosevelt was elected, farms and small towns had no electricity. Roosevelt fixed that for sure.

I would put two and two together as I got older. I realized that the “Mosquito trucks” that drove through our town on summer evening were spraying a fog of DDT mixed with kerosene. They sprayed almost every street using a big fan and pump mounted on the truck bed, sending out clouds of DDT to kill the mosquitoes. It meant people could enjoy being outside after supper during the long daylight of summer evenings. My mother always complained about the smell of kerosene when the trucks came through.

None of this mattered to me. I had seen a Stearman, closeup. A pilot had waved and dipped his wings to say he saw me. I would relive the sight of the pilot who waved in my dreams for days. I would not read Rachael Carson’s book, Silent Spring,about the dangers to animals and people caused by spraying DDT until I was a college student. Yesterday, the New York Times told of the thousands of lives that were saved by DDT in several African countries in recent months. It was a cheap and effective way to kill mosquitoes and fight malaria. Recalling Rachel Carson’s warning, I congratulated myself that I had managed to stay alive, despite the dusting I received in Vashti, the day a crop duster pilot waived at me.