I was about five when my Mother told me we were moving to Beaumont. It was about 1949 and we were living with my Grandfather, Daddy Wall, on the corner of E.Worth and Dooley in Grapevine.( I don't think the streets had names then, but I listed them just in case you wanted to go see the old bois d'arc tree.) My paternal Grandparents as well as my cousins, aunts and uncles and anyone else I was kin to also lived in Grapevine. My Dad had taken a job with Lamar Tech School of Vocation (Now Lamar Institute of Technology). As I recall, I was not fond of the move and I remember my Mother telling me about the advantages of moving to a new place. I remember she said, "The good thing about Beaumont is the mosquitoes are too big to come through the screens at night"Was she ever right!! You see, this was before air conditioning was common and most houses had an attic fan that pulled a breeze through the open windows at night. The window was protected by a window screen that kept the critters at bay as the cool breeze lulled you to sleep. Ahh! no problem with mosquitoes biting you while you slept.
We owned a house on the last developed street south of town. At night you could hear the sounds and sometimes voices, coming from the Spindletop Oil field just a few blocks away.
However, it did not take long to find out why the mosquitoes didn't come through the screens. They were too big to come through the screens, but, they could open the door if they wanted to. They were huge. And there was plenty of them. Black marsh mosquitoes even hurt when they bite. At night they would come out and bite any exposed skin available. I remember playing baseball at night at the Babe Ruth Park (Now Vincent-Beck Stadium) and looking down at my white sanitary socks exposed from the baseball leggings and seeing nothing but black. You could kill hundreds of them with one swat. Later as more folks got window A/C units the would plug the filters. Livestock were often killed by the overwhelming infestations.
One such mosquito control was the Mosquito Truck. It would ride up and down the streets spraying a dense fog of some unknown chemical pesticide. If we were outside when it came, we would run behind the truck getting lost in the fog. (They may be what is wrong with some of my friends today).
Another mosquito control device was the pic. It was a coil that you would light and would burn slowly, emitting some type of smoke that kept them away. It worked well in small enclosed areas.
Particularly the drive-in movie. You would pick up your date and say let's go to the drive in. The response would always be, "You got a pic?"
After finishing college I moved to Chattanooga and found the mosquito population to be very small.
I can recall some of my Tennessee co-workers from time to time complaining about the mosquitoes.
I would merely say, "You don't know mosquitoes."
When I moved back to SE Texas in 1980, the mosquito problem was pretty much under control. There is even a County Agency called "Mosquito Control". They spray overhead with airplanes, much like an agriculture crop duster. They will be bad for a few days after a rain, but the planes will be out and then, no problem.
After Hurricane Rita they got real bad again. It took awhile to get them under control. Some of the regular planes must have been damaged in the storm. The aerial spraying was done by a C-130 plane.
It was a strange site to see a large low flying aircraft flying overhead until you realized what they were doing.
Today, Malathion is the pesticide of choice. I am sure in time it will be shown to cause cancer in some laboratory rat and be banned. But, it does the job.
If you ever want to know what it was like in the 50's and 60's, just go to the beach right after a good rain. You will find black marsh mosquitoes that are too big to come through the screens.
