Bob Sanders: The old sport of knocking off wasps

To show you how starved for recreational outlets we were back in the Great Depression, one popular sport was robbing wasp (pronounced “waust”) nests.

In a corner of a barn or crib or shed or cotton house, there’d be a big wasp nest. The idea was to sneak up and knock it down, then run fast enough to keep from getting stung.

I was always the least aggressive in the knocking part, and the slowest in the running part. I got stung a lot. Crippled cousin Gay seemed to run faster than I did. There were big red wasps and smaller, striped wasps Either could put a hurtin’ on you.

And I have a running feud with yellow jackets. I was in my back yard, just walking around over the property, when a yellow jacket stung me right at the top of my ear.

Hurt?

Whachoo talkin’ about?

I’d think the hurt was easing off, and here it’d come again. But I saw the hole whence the culprit came, and that night, when all little yellow jackets were sound asleep, I snuck down there with my can of Raid or something and saturated that hole with it. Didn’t have any more trouble with that nest.

But the worst was the time Daddy sent me’n brother Jack over to the Chandler place to drag a dead chestnut tree to the house. He thought it might make good fence posts (yes, I’m old enough to remember American chestnuts).

No problem, except we had to go through an old pasture gate, and right smack in the middle was a yellow jacket nest.

We got through OK, but in the excitement, Jack had dropped the ax squarely on top of the hole...and the yellow jackets were riled up by now.

“Go get the ax,” I commanded.

“Nope,” he said.

“You dropped it, go get it.”

“Ain’t going. No way.”

I called him a wide variety of things, questioned his ancestry, and I don’t know what all. He wouldn’t budge.

We needed the ax. So, super-hero to the rescue. I went back, and got stung many, many times, beyond the counting.

By then, it didn’t matter. What were a dozen more stings? So I stood there, and with my Star Brand plow shoes carefully stuffed dirt in the hole and packed it real good.

Take that.

It was maybe six months before I snarled at Jack again. Turned out, the tree was not worth saving anyway.

Come to think of it, that was near the place where he refused to ride with me on the big load of hay, just because the narrow, rough-rutted wagon road went right by a sheer-sided, deep gully, and also because the hay had a lot of broom sedge in it, making it subject to slide off very easily.

You can’t buy that kind of loyalty.

Bob Sanders is a longtime radio personality with WAUD in Auburn and writes a weekly column for the Opelika-Auburn News.