031
Item
-
Title
-
031
-
Transcription
-
PEST CONTROL
Are you being eaten by bugs, lice, fleas, mice or rats? Call the pest exterminator. He will bring his chemicals and electrically powered machines and clean things up for you. As late as 1932 we had no electrical equipment and very few chemicals that could be of help. We had to invent our own method of getting rid of the pests. If we couldn't get rid of them, we just lived with them.
It seemed to me, when I was a boy, that my folks were always fighting some kind of pest. Flies, bedbugs, fleas, mice, mites, these were always a concern in the house. Lice ticks, fleas, worms, were year around problems with cattle, horses, hogs, chickens, cats and dogs. Grasshoppers, potato bugs, and worms were eating up our garden and other crops the minute we turned our backs.
The ordinary house fly, on the ranch where there were cattle and horses, was the most common pest. We built fly traps that caught them by the thousands. The traps were made of ordinary window screen rolled into a cylinder with cone shaped entrance at the bottom. Fly bait of food would attract the flies, when they flew away, they would hit the cone shaped part of the trap and crawl into a hole that the could never find to get out of. Then there was sticky fly paper of various kinds. The ribbon of sticky paper that hung from the ceiling, or the large flat piece of paper wit glue that was an attraction for flies and bugs.
Bedbugs, ticks or fleas were not common if care was taken to keep things clean. The problem could arise at harvest time when extra help was hired. Mumsie made sure that some of the clothing would be left outside, but that didn't always work. When there was evidence that some of these pests might be present, she would close up the house and put a pan of sulphur [sic] on the floor and light a match to it. The fumes would kill every living thing in the house. When the sulphur [sic] burned out, she would open up the house, and air it out. When winter came, mice could always find a way into the house.
The worms and bugs always seemed to get to the garden before we did. The tobacco worms on the tomato vines, or the potato bug on the potatoes. The chemical that we used was called PARIS GREEN, a bright green powder, made by mixing sodium arsenic with copper sulfate and acetic acid. We would put a small amount of the mixture with water in a pail, and walk down the potato row and sprinkle the mixture on the vines. If we did not use the poison, we took a small can with some kerosene in it and picked the bugs and worms off the vine and threw them into the kerosene.
-
Rights
-
To inquire about usage, please contact Archives & Special Collections, University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries. These images are for educational use only. Not all images are available for publication.
Metzger Memories
