The Story
As a boy in the 1950’s I grew up in a rural community in North Carolina. It was a tradition for farmers and other country folks to butcher their own hogs and prepare them for consumption during the long winter months ahead. One of the hazards of butchering hogs in an open
environment was flies, especially if the weather was too warm. So, butcher days were usually planned for late fall or early winter to help
alleviate the fly problem.
One day is the early fall as I was passing Mr. Leroy John’s home place I saw his butcher kettle steaming. It was too early in the year to be butchering because it was actually very warm out. Since I have a curious nature and I felt I needed to know what was going on I went through the gate and into the back yard. I did not see anyone around so I called out to Mr. Leroy. He in kind responded with, “in here.” “In here”, I said and he replied, “Yes, in the barn.” I walked in and to my surprise Mr. Leroy was cutting meat and preparing it for the smoke house.
As I looked around I saw gallon jugs of water hanging from the ceiling all around the barn. My first thought was Mr. Leroy had gone off his rocker. Then Mr. Leroy said, “what’s the matter boy, haven’t you ever seen anybody cutting meat before?” I said, “Yes sir, but never have I seen anybody hang jugs of water from the ceiling.” He said, “Son look around and tell me what you see.” As I looked around I could see the windows and doors were standing wide open and meat was spread out on the tables, but that didn’t explain the jugs hanging from the ceiling. Seeing the look of bewilderment on my face Mr. Leroy said, “flies, there are no flies in here.”
Only then did I realize there weren’t any flies buzzing around the fresh cut meat. Mr. Leroy explained to me about the water in the jugs creating a mirror like reflection and this caused the flies to stay away thus reflecting the flies. I thought this was the neatest thing I had ever seen.
Through the years since then I have seen numerous people putting different types of plastic bags on the doors of restaurants or open windows of their homes to repel the flies. They all have said that it absolutely works. My thought was if it works for these people it could work for everyone thus the Reflect-O-Fly bag was conceived and is now working for thousands of people throughout the south.
Mr. Harold James
Co-Founder of
Reflect-O-Fly