Yerington’s 1950’s Kids Chase The Mosquito Truck

Yerington’s 1950’s Kids Chase The Mosquito Truck

A Memoir by Mary Burns

(Published in the Mason Valley News in 1987)

Burns Kids 1950's

Mary Burns

The year is 1959(ish) in a South Yerington neighborhood after dinner on hot July evening. Twenty or so juvenile type renegades come streaming out of our houses and start gathering on the big lawn.  Our tummies now full - we are ready for some action.  

Could this be the night? It hasn’t happened in awhile. Maybe it will show tonight.  Twenty little kids, nauseous with anticipation, are impatiently shifting around the big lawn.  At dusk, the slaughter house’s pungent fragrance permeates the air.  “Where is it?”.  “A no show?” (Hissssss) -”Quiet everybody!!  Do you hear that?”  “Ah, Dennis, knock it off, you’re always imagining things.”  Dejectedly, we slowly, wander to the best hide and seek house.  I guess “it’s not coming tonight”.  What a drag.  Another boring night of hide and seek….(Hissss) Then louder (Hissss)...”Hey guys, hold on, ya hear that?”  We looked….and there it was!  The sure sign of our famous visitor -  a dark cloud about four blocks away.  We dashed for our bikes and raced our flat wheeled machines toward the dark hissing cloud - forty little legs in a blur.

We flew around the corner as one unit and immediately slammed on our brakes.  “Wow, guys, look at that!  The biggest, darkest, badest, loudest clouded ever.”  This is amazing!!...  This is better than Disneyland!…This is the mosquito  fogger!!.. And the chemicals are stronger than ever!  We each disappear into the poisonous cloud - in ecstasy - riding blindly. “This is great - I can’t even see my handlebars.  The best  fog bank in weeks!”  The noxious fumes penetrate our every pore and we reek with pleasure. My eyes are streaming hot lava and I’m sure I’m blind.  My lungs suffocating with fire, are screeching for air.  My nose is stinging and starting to run.  I start to cough, gag and choke.  “This is super and who says there’s nothing to do in Yerington?”  Eventually, one by one, we fall back out of the poisonous vapors.  As the fogger lumbers down the street, we circle our bikes for the storytelling part of the experience. I think Billy won that night.  He said he rode right up to the poison emitting spout and put his finger in it!  What a man! (What a B.S.’er!)

Darkness was near now.  Being on the downhill slope of our adrenalin highs. we were physically and emotionally spent and welcomed the calling home by our moma. (Actually Danny’s dad whistled him home,  as did Billy’s and Larry’s, and my mom honked the car horn three times,) The calm of the evening  had returned as we shuffled to our respective homes.  Just as the screen doors closed us in, we could hear twenty maternal voices shrieking through the screened windows and out into the sultry evening.  “Whew, get into the bathtub right now and take off those clothes off outside”, to which twenty little juvenile type renegades whined, “But mom, I went swimming today. ‘member?  I don’t need a bath”

I can’t speak for the Utah accountant, insurance broker, airline pilot, assessor, Governor’s chauffeur, Nevada State special investigator, telephone company retiree, M.D., R,N., Yerington businesswoman, newspaper owner/editor, attorneys, educators, trucking exec, contractor, butcher, baker and candlestick maker, who came out of that neighborhood; but I do know that the weekly dose of caustic fumes inhaled in our lungs and brain tissue didn’t bother me...bother me...bother me…  It’s the North Yerington kids I’d worry about!  Oh, yes, and as for our dogs, our ever faithful companions - who stuck with us through thick and thin or mosquito foggers - they either died from old age or car tag (as did their offspring).

The bottom line is encephalitis and other mosquito related diseases can be -and are often- deadly.  Do what it takes to get a handle on it!

Goat Memories

“If you’re short of trouble, take a goat.”~ Finnish saying

When one gets old, the slightest little thing can send one’s mind spinning down memory lane. This morning I watched at a little video of my nephew Christopher’s sons at a petting zoo. They had accidentally let one of the little goats out of its pen, and the boys and their dad were trying to coax it back in. It was funny and sent my memory whirling to a time when my daughter, Shannon, (age 4 at the time) and I had a goat experience of our own.

It was the best of times; it was the worst of times. I had just recently received the Lord-that made it the best of times. But I was struggling financially, following a divorce. Things were so tight; the best I could afford for us was a little cabin back off the road in Olivehurst, California. The rent was $50 per month including utilities, and I still had a hard time making it!

I worked in Sacramento, which was an hour’s commute, so I was gone from our little shack a long time each day. I started having a problem with my neighbors breaking into my cabin while I was gone. I was broken into seven times, in a two-month period, but did not have the money to move. I had almost everything stolen, including my daughter’s toys, clothes, iron and ironing board, and even the meat out of my freezer. I remember my mother coming to visit and her remarking to me, “Chere, you have no earthly goods!”

One hot summer day, I came home to find my door wide open. As I drove up, I was shocked to see two big horned Billy goats munching on my couch in the living room. Leaving my daughter in the car, I jumped out and grabbed a two-by-four lying on the ground. I started yelling at them and hitting the side of the house with the board, hoping to scare them out. They were not even fazed; as a matter of fact, they simply looked at me as if to say, “What are you doing here?” The only one that seemed to be scared was me. Their big horns were very frightening to me. Shannon started laughing, and I kept on yelling and crying.

It was “hot as a Billy goat in a pepper patch,” as the old Texas saying goes. I was tired, frustrated and scared, and just when I had reached the apex of my hysteria; I looked up and observed a Mexican man with a piece of garden hose in his hand moseying towards my cabin. As he reached the door of my house, he yelled something in Spanish to the goats and waved the hose and out they flew. The Mexican man gave me an apologetic look and nod. As the goats wandered past me, they paused to stare with vacant brown eyes, bleated sneeringly, and then they and their master moved on back over to their property behind my cabin.

I learned a few things about goats that day. All goats are mischievous thieves, gatecrashers, and trespassers. It was OK to be afraid for Edgar Watson Howe said, “One has fear in front of a goat, in back of a mule, and on every side of a fool.” Goats will eat just about anything-including couches. That is why an Italian proverb states, “No one ever saw a goat dead of hunger.” But most important, I learned that one must speak in a language that goats understand, if you are to get their cooperation. An Indonesian proverb says, “If you enter a goat stable, bleat; if you enter a water buffalo stable, bellow.” I would like to add, if your goats speak Spanish, then bleat in Spanish and carry a big hose.