Just after the Second World War, an Arbon Valley wheat field was sprayed for weeds from an airplane. The farmer was Mel Bailey. The pilot was Curley Wilson, who ran the Wilson Flying Service at Pocatello. The papers called it the first job of its kind for Wilson's company, and one account called it the first in the county. The Pocatello paper told the story three times: in a feature on the flying service in August 1950, in one paragraph of an aviation section in April 1951, and at most length in a Sunday feature by correspondent Lena Anken Sexton in June 1964.
The accounts disagree about the year. Sexton's 1964 story puts it in 1946, and her headline says so too. The two earlier articles point to 1947. In August 1950 Wilson spoke of the flight as three years past, and the 1951 article gives the year as 1947. Neither date can be settled from what has been found. No report from the time of the flight itself has turned up.
How it began
As Sexton heard it, the idea was Bailey's. A magazine piece had told him about 2,4-D, a new weed killer said to spare the grain it landed on. He brought the article to Wilson and asked whether the flier's plane could be fitted to put the chemical on his fall wheat. The two men built the rig themselves out of a spray boom fixed under the plane and a used tank set in just aft of where Wilson sat. Some hundred farmers came to see it tried, and Sexton wrote that they were "laughing their heads off." On his run Wilson held the plane about six feet above the grain while he released the spray, and the experiment worked.
In Sexton's account, no farm in Bannock County had been treated from an airplane before. Arbon Valley had in fact been part of Power County since 1913, so the reporter may simply have meant the Pocatello country.
Wilson's own telling, in 1950, adds the result. He remembered that the other farmers around Arbon thought Bailey was throwing away good money and good time, and made fun of him for it. The mustard had blanketed his ground; three weeks after the flight it was gone, and the joke had turned in Bailey's favor. Requests had kept climbing ever since, he said, as more farmers decided an airplane was worth calling in to protect a crop from weeds. Wilson gave much of the credit to three men who had helped work out the method and get farmers interested: Jack Wursten, a chemist with the Simplot Fertilizer company, and the Power County farm agents Delaine Hill and Sterling Schow.
What grew from it
By the 1950 account, Wilson sprayed about 2,000 acres in his first season and around 6,000 acres by 1950. The work came in a burst of about six weeks in midsummer. Wilson flew light two-seat Aeronca Champions. Each carried its chemical in a tank under the fuselage, piped out to a spray bar along the underside of the wing. Out in the field two flagmen marked the line for every pass, and the pilot sprayed a strip 40 feet wide on each one, flying about 12 feet up. In 1951 the paper put the farmer's cost at $1.75 an acre, which paid for the chemical as well as the plane and its pilot. By then both of Pocatello's flying services were sending their planes over wheat fields every spring, on jobs that took them south into Utah and east into Wyoming.
By 1964 Wilson had five pilots, a new fertilizer plant at Bancroft and 22 men on the payroll. The 1964 feature on that business is summarized in the report below.
Who Mel Bailey was
None of the three articles gives Bailey's full name. He was very probably Melvin Kerr Bailey (1895–1952), a son of J. R. and Annie Bailey. In 1941 he bought his father's farm on the west side of the valley, and he and his wife Stella farmed it until his death in May 1952. The 1950 census found them still on that farm. No other Mel or Melvin Bailey is known to have been farming in the valley in those years. The articles do not say whether the sprayed field was that farm or Melvin's own homestead farther north. Nor do they say how many acres were sprayed or in which month. His family's story is on the Bailey family page and in the history of J. R. Bailey.
On this site: the earliest airplane on record over the valley is in the first airplane over the valley, and a Wilson Flying Service plane lost in 1950 is in the 1950 crash near Rattlesnake Creek. For the farming community the spray plane served, see Arbon. If your family remembers the day of the first spraying, or knows the year, the site would be glad to hear from you through the Contribute page.
The story as reported
Idaho State Journal, June 14, 1964, page 30. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.
POCATELLO — Crop spraying from the air, which began in the area with a single Arbon Valley wheat field, had become a sizable business for Curley Wilson by the summer of 1964, a Sunday feature by correspondent Lena Anken Sexton reported.
Wilson's bill for 2,4-D had already reached $10,000 that year, and plenty of the season remained. He employed five pilots, and between them they were treating sugar beets, grain fields and brushland by the thousands of acres. Whenever the weather cooperated, the flying began at first light. Near each job a ground crew set up at a rough temporary airstrip to refill the tanks, whether the load was herbicide, insecticide or fertilizer, and every plane could apply its chemical as a liquid or as a powder.
Since 1963 the company had run its own fertilizer plant at Bancroft, where large augers moved the material straight into trucks or planes, so it no longer had to be handled in sacks. Counting plant hands, truck drivers and pilots, 22 men worked for the company.
The article went back to the beginning. In its telling, the Arbon Valley farmer Mel Bailey had read a magazine article about 2,4-D and asked Wilson to apply it to his fall wheat from the air. Roughly a hundred neighboring farmers watched and laughed as Wilson took the rigged-up plane over the field at about six feet, and the spraying worked. The article dated this to 1946 and called it the first aerial spraying in Bannock County.
Sexton also profiled two of the pilots. Dale (Buddy) Reid, from Casa Grande, Ariz., was a 16-year flier whose spraying had taken him across the Middle East; he had just come in to refuel after a job on mountain fields near Inkom. Jozef (Joe) Huysman came from Belgium, where his family's home sat about equally far from Antwerp and Brussels. The article explained that Belgian aviation was a government affair; a boy who wanted to fly worked off his lessons at the airport, washing planes and doing other chores. Wilson thought highly of Huysman, calling him a born flier who took care on every job. Another young pilot, Mislav Caric, had come from Argentina.
Los Angeles was where Wilson first took up flying, in 1929. In the Navy's V-5 program he instructed cadets at the Southern Branch, the school now called Idaho State University, and he had sent more than 400 students up on their first solo. Wilson had logged over a million miles in the air without a single accident or violation, an achievement recorded on a plaque in his office.