An older neighbor lady of mine was telling me what it was like to live in Arizona in the 1940s. She said they used to sleep outside in summertime, in a sleeping porch. There were no mosquitos here then, unlike now... all the golf courses and the Tempe Town Lake have bred mosquitos like crazy. But her father would pour kerosene into empty tuna cans and then set each bedpost into a can. This wasn’t for bedbugs... it was to keep the scorpions from crawling up into the bed.
It’s why I always bang my shoes upside down before
putting my foot into them, a habit from Nam.
YIKES, yea now that you mention the cans filled with kerosene I believe that’s what grandma said they did. I couldn’t remember how they put the kerosene on the bed posts. I was pretty sure it wasn’t right on the metal.