Wasps

In the mid-1960s our parents added a family room and master bedroom to our house, and a swimming pool to the side yard. With summer temperatures in the 100’s, my brother and I spent countless hours in the pool. We played Marco Polo and we swam races and engaged in under-water treasure searches. And we used our plastic sandals to kill wasps on the surface of the pool by swatting them. These were common stinging wasps that gathered in our yard and settled themselves on the surface of the pool. We managed to get stung more than once so I guess we thought it was well within our right to slaughter them. So we would swat them dead and then line up their limp bodies along the pool’s edge. Our competition consisted of a race to see who could accumulate the most wasp carcasses on the sidewalk before sunset. This is about the same time that Rachel Carson was writing her epic environmental text, Silent Spring.

Before we had our own pool, our family went swimming in the Olympic sized pool on the estate that belonged to Jacqueline Cochran. Our friends, the Laynes, rented one of the homes on her estate. It was an old pool, going back to the1940s perhaps. It had no recirculating/filtering system. After the pool began to get a little dirty they simply emptied all the water into the nearby date grove. Jacqueline Cochran was one of the first professional female pilots in America. During the war she ferried jets across the country to position them for wartime use. She was one of the Women Air Force Service Pilots, or “WASPS” for short. But I guess it is a little ironic that before my brother and I were swatting wasps in our little pool we were swimming in the big pool that belonged to a “WASP”. I’m glad she didn’t try to swat us.