Crop dusting in the 1970's...

Check out this unique video...

A hangar of old Stearmans.. loading the hopper without any protective gear.. hand propping the beast and skimming the tops of cotton with your wheels...

 

Been there done that in the 30's. No umbrella, though.

 

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Poor guy with the marker umbrella must have gotten a pretty good dose of whatever they were spraying.

 

I flagged rows when I was a kid. They were dusting celery and lettuce and I used to get some of whatever it was, a blueish powder. Must explain some of my quirks that I have now.

 

Yep. I flagged a few in '70s. No dain bramage that I'm erawa of.

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Me too, cotton mostly, and grapes, and fruit trees; San Joaquin valley and MX.
Stearmans first, then AgCats, then 'copters. And always me on the ground.
pfffft...umbrella.....thats for kids! Your red or yellow bandana was just fine.....
My oncologists said that may have been a factor.......

 

Did you also grow up in the Breadbasket Of The World?

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OK, two crop dusting stories. First, I was ballooning early one morning back in the 70's and happened to fly over a small dirt strip that was base for a local dusting operation. Coming back from a run the AgCat pilot decided to circle me as a bit of a wave to a fellow airman. He stood his plane up on end and did a full 360º circle around me. It was very cool; just he and I sharing the sky in that moment.

Second story happened in Mexico, west of Tampico in the early 80's. I had been hired to set up a Hot Air Balloon sewing factory for an advertising agency based in Mexico City. They wanted to build their own envelopes with client logos, colors etc. rather than buy them from the US manufacturers. The cutting room was in a hangar borrower from a large crop dusting operation. There was "dust" everywhere outside where the chemicals were stored and the planes resupplied. There was this German Sheppard wandering about that looked drunk. I later saw him lapping water out of his dog bowel and realized it also was "dusty". After a couple of slurps I watched him have a few seizures, then walk away. Clearly, the chemicals were affecting his brain function. Sad.

 

Back in 1979, I was driving north on I-5 after having made an overnight stop in Sacramento. About 10 miles north of town, off to the right side of the road well up ahead, I saw an aircraft suddenly pop up from behind the trees, do a hammerhead, and disappear back below the trees. As I got closer I could see that he was dusting crops, going in a direction perpendicular to the road. I kept an eye on him as I passed and then in my rear-view mirror as long as I could. It was a biplane, but I don't remember whether it was a Stearman or an Ag-Cat.

 

That area is rice paddy country and full of crop dusters and mosquitos. I know of three Travel Air ex-crop duster wrecks that came from the Willows/ Williams area that were restored to museum pieces. Some dusters do the hammerhead to turn, others do a sort of wing-over turn. I have seen both. I suppose that the hammerhead keeps you closer to line up on the next row. Got to thinking that when I was a bit younger I used to hand prop a lot of stuff from 36hp Aeroncas to an AT-6 (won a $10.00 bet on that one). Also several rotary's. I have enjoyed some fun days that will no longer happen.

 

Surrounded by "Fresno Indians" and eventually married to one. (fresno indians.....bad jimmy, bad jimmy. get woke)

 

Ah, Fresno, home to the prettiest Indians in the USA. Proven fact.

I marched in Selma.

OK, so it was a band competition. A-and it was Selma, CA. A-a-and it was the '70s . . .

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Seen night, as in late night/very early morning, dusting in the Imperial Valley along the Colorado River. All you see is this giant spot light dancing around the sky. Driving late at night with too much caffeine it's sort of a 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind' feeling.

 

The good old days, when cancer was an astrological sign or a line on a map and everybody had a bottle of carbon tet in the house.

 

and had lead water pipes in the house and played with mercury and pennies...

then spent 3 months watching nuclear tests from at least three miles and later feeling the heat from two thermonuclear high altitude tests..

then having agent orange exposure during the 375 days in VietNam..

like - what could go wrong?

Only 85 and counting, can't catch Parks!

Life is good!

Best regards,

Robert

 

Admiral- If we had known we would live this long, we would have taken better care of ourselves.

In the olden days, we used to just dump hydrazine on the ground. That is the best way to get rid of rocket propellant, right?

 

Dear Terry,

So true!

The hydrazine dumping brings to memory a high school chem lab experiment which did not go well involving ammonia, bleach and acetone; the resulting combination was supposed to be a homemade brew for a solid rocket fuel. Fortunately the lab teacher had us try this mess outside and we never got past the violent reactive stage. That did not fall in the category of taking better care of ourselves.

Best regards,

Robert

 

I got my aerial application license while I was in the military in Bainbridge GA. I worked for EAST supporting Plan Colombia. We sprayed glysophaste from OV10s and Air Tractors. Fun times.

 

Seen this video before. The pilot is John Walton the son of Sam Walton. Died in an ultra light accident 2005 according to Wikipedia.
Was worth about $18 billion at the time of his death. Led an interesting life.

 

Not when that video was made in the ‘70s. Wikipedia says he got into crop dusting after serving in Viet Nam as green beret
and awarded Silver Star. See John T Walton.

 

Your lab experiment reminded me of my physics experiment. I made a liquid rocket engine. I used a small bottle of compressed air, glass bottle of water in which I put calcium carbide, and tubes with valves that led to a 50 cal. shell. After giving a small lecture on how a rocket engine works, I putting in the calcium carbide, I opened up the two valves and lit the gas coming out of the shell...had a flame about a foot and the shell turned cherry red. Basically it was a blow torch. The class couldn’t get out of the way fast enough. This was in the classroom. Can’t imagine doing that today. This was back in the 50s.

 

Darryl,

Small wonder that we are still around today!

Best regards

Robert

 

Having rescued several other students during chem lab experiment explosions/fires, y'all were lucky.