North Side Cafe: Bedbugs Create Itchy Problem

"Dad, this is not funny!" Paige said, holding up her arm.

Holly Lake Jake could see his daughter was distraught. He also knew she had a serious problem. Jake had seen these welts before. "Good Lord," he thought.

"Darling, those are bed bug bites, and …." Her scream cut him off in mid-sentence.

"Bed bugs! No! No!" she screamed, then collapsed in his arms.

The North Side coffee klatch knows bed bugs. It was a fact of life before the invention of DDT.

"How? Why? What’ll I do?" Paige screamed, scratching her arm."

Jake’s daughter is as fastidiously clean as she is dramatic.

"First, stop scratching or it will get infected," Jake said. "You probably got them while in New York."

Jake has that right. Infestations are showing up at colleges, hotels and motels, dressing rooms, used furniture stores and offices. Our love of travel to exotic places for fun and war is making it worse.

"I hate bugs!" his daughter screamed. "I’m washing everything, buying new mattresses, pulling up carpet …." Her spittle was airborne, and her eyes were bugged.

"Whoa, Baby." Jake calmly interrupted. He had watched his mother and knew the drill — hot water and dryers, inspection, reduced clutter, vacuuming and sealing.

There was a good reason our grandparents used to say, "Cleanliness is next to godliness."

Bed bugs live months without a meal in mattress seams, box springs, baseboards, behind wallpaper and in clutter. Thank God they carry no known diseases.

Back at the café, the boys were talking about bed bug hysteria.

"I remember igniting gunpowder on mattresses or soaking them with gasoline. Uncle Clem fumigated buildings with burning sulfur or cyanide gas," Manor Hill Mack said. (The best-known brand was Zyklon B, which later became infamous at Auschwitz.)

Jake smiled. He pictured a rabid environmentalist locked in a room infested with bedbugs. "DDT will be making a comeback," he thought.