Spraying for mosquitos used to be quite common in and around Dallas. In a nearby town where I lived during grade school, they regularly had mosquito spraying trucks go up and down the street putting out huge clouds of pesticide.
We called them "the fogging machines" and whenever they came up the street I and a group of friends would jump on our bikes and follow as close behind the trucks as possible so we could be completely enveloped in the fog.
Yep, there we were peddling furiously and breathing in and out heavily and sucking in the fumes only a couple of feet away from the fog nozzle for blocks at a time. Great fun. And hey, it was only DDT . . .
I think about that now and just go OMG!
We did other similar fun things you might relate to:
Using the ol' pump sprayer to spray Black Flag DDT around the kitchen table at meals to get rid of flies.
Melting down lead and making our own fishing weights.
Breaking thermometers so we could play with the mercury.
Breaking flourescent lights to watch them pop and release the mercury vapor.
Drinking from polyvinyl water hoses.
Tossing pencils at the ceilings of our classrooms to try to get them to stick in the sprayed on asbestos and knocking bits of asbestos loose to rain down on us.
Painting our scratches and wounds with mercurochrome (or merthiolate).
Shooting freon cans to release the cloud of freon.
I'm sure there are several more similar things we did. And we hear how healthy it used to be when kids were growing up . . .
I am certain that I ruined a fortune's worth of baseball cards on my bike's spokes. My biking days were in the late 50's to early 60's - some of the most collectible cards were going round back then and I had quite the collection. Thought nothing of putting a Mickey Mantle or Sandy Koufax on the bike, as I had several extras of them . . .
According to Dallas TV station KTVT, though the home of former President George W. Bush is an area that was scheduled to be sprayed, it is one of several places pilots were told to avoid.