When lyricist Ron Shields wrote about "The Good Old Summer Time" back in 1902, he probably wasn't thinking about our part of the country.

Perhaps he had in mind the North Woods (overlooking the B52-caliber mosquitoes), or the all-American Midwest (apart from the occasional flood) or balmy Southern California (without the wildfires). Surely not the long, muggy, buggy months that make up the silly season around here.

Durham, in the good old days, was described as "the hottest place this side of His Satanic Majestie's dominion" and its summer as "fly time."

The town that proclaimed itself "Renowned the World Around" for "Progress, Success, Wealth, Health" upon a short-lived electric billboard in 1913 embarked, the very next year, on a "Swat-the-Fly" campaign. ("Swat-the-fly" had been a nationwide campaign the previous year, but Durham hadn't paid much attention.)

To be fair, the fly-attracting conditions were better than they had been. Pigpens had been outlawed within 10 feet of a street, "necessary houses" had to be secured against rooting hogs, electric streetcars had replaced the horse-dropping variety and there was even a public-health department.

Nevertheless, in the 1910s, creek-bottom neighborhoods remained repositories of reeking stuff and buzzards were seen foraging along Duke Street.

As fly season 1914 approached, a Durham doctor named Purinton declared that a single fly dipping into a milk pitcher could leave 1.25 million bacteria. One local merchant pitched screen doors and windows, "keeping more flies from Durham than ever." Another said, "Sickness is expensive, screens are cheap."

The Rexall drugstore gave away fly swatters, while advertising for sale such pesticidal products as Creoleum, Noxicide, Conklin's Fly Knocker and Black Flag.

Meantime, the new health department was finding the town's waste-disposal methods (hauling it off and dumping it) "a big problem" and the town aldermen were fretting over how much it cost to dispose of the daily leavings from streets and outhouses.

Snooty neighboring communities called typhoid "Durham fever," but it wasn't just a problem of image. Typhoid, along with pellagra, hookworm and tuberculosis were common despite the well-attested benefits to health from inhaling the fragrance of tobacco (also said to "smell like money").

Yet, warned Dr. Purinton, the fly was one of the community's greatest dangers, one "close to every one of us."

"They alight upon decomposing matter and next, perhaps, on the lips of your baby," he said.

Further, garbage and "nightsoil" weren't the only source of fly-spread contamination.

"With germs gathered in the contagious wards of hospitals, they spread disease and death."

Yecchh. Not quite the picture of strolling down a shady lane with pretzels and beer, or gathering by the bandshell for an ice-cream social.

The summertime of nostalgia definitely had flies in the lemonade, so to speak.

'Course, those were the old summertimes. Nowadays, our town is sanitized, and when it's hot we keep our homes and places of business closed up to hold in the air conditioning.

But that's probably not anything you'd write a song about.