Current Comments ” I EUGENE

Anyone growing up in a city, especially in tenements, has encountered cockroaches. From childhood I remember my mother clobbering them with a shoe or a newspaper. Looking back, I marvel at how mothers in slums managed to keep apartments free of them. Even in modem high rises, these inseets are indefatigable--often outwitting regulas extermination squads. However, what I encountered as a child was nothing compared to my Army experiences. When my outfit transferred from Colorado to Texas, we were installed in barracks so full of cmkroaches, gas bombs had to be used to clean them out! I vividly recall a pile of dead roaches that was literally two feet high. Like many other insects inhabiting the urban environment (like flies and silverfish), cockroaches generally conjure up negative images in the US. 1 But unlike other insects, cockroaches seem to be associated with taboo topics. You don’t talk about them in polite company. But this has never deterred us in selecting topics for essays in Current