The Corona Chronicles: Chapter 4 (Super Retro Oldtimey Historical Edition!)

As promised in my last post, I have something special to share with you today.

A while ago I went through a phase in which reading about disasters -- floods, fires, boats sinking, etc. -- felt oddly comforting. During that time, I read about the flu epidemic of 1918-20 (aka the Spanish Flu). A few months later, while transcribing some personal accounts my great-grandmother had written, I was drawn in to one particular part of her life story, one that I may have glossed over during previous readings: her own experience of contracting the flu in 1918.

In the fall of that year, my great-grandparents and their (then) five children lived in Denver, Colorado. They resided in the Globeville neighborhood, which at the time was known (and sometimes scorned) for its high population of Eastern-European immigrants. 

Elizabeth, my great-grandmother, had been born shortly after her parents arrived in the United States from Russia. (They were Germans living in Russia... interesting story, there.) Peter, my great-grandfather, was a teenager when his family made the same trip, and he later wrote about his long journey from Russia to America. Elizabeth and Peter married in 1908. They lost their first son, Adam, when he was a baby. By the time 1918 rolled around, they had five children: twins Anna and Marie (b. 1911), William (1913), Paul (1915), and Sam (1917).

In her memoirs, Elizabeth wrote:

That fall the flu epidemic broke out ... and believe me I really was sick. Then the children, one after another took down with it, all but Anna, nearly seven years, and Paul, 2 years old. Of course, I kept getting up and trying to tend to them, so I caught pneumonia. By that time [my husband] was down too, so they took me to the hospital.

Anna used to make tea, and fed the sick tea and graham crackers for a week. One time a visiting nurse brought some barley soup to us. It tasted heavenly.

My great-grandfather begged his in-laws to come and help take care of the family, but they were afraid of catching the virus, so they didn't come. This refusal was something my great-grandmother remembered for years to come. Two people did come: her sister (who soon took ill herself) and her father. Her father remained asymptomatic and was a great help to the family. However, he did have one shortcoming...

There was one thing my father could not do and that was the washing. There were stacks of bedding ... and he couldn't find anyone that could do the washing. Mr. Walker was a laundry man; he told my father to put the clothes out on the front porch and he would pick them up. But the laundry issued orders that they could not pick them up, so they laid there on the porch for a couple weeks. Finally my father took them in again. He would try to wash a little for the baby, Sam, and he would go to town and buy pillowcases and sheets and night clothes; so by the time I got well, we had stacks of bedding.

Finally, her father ran into an old friend at the store one day, and this friend agreed to do the washing. The family would thereafter leave the needing-to-be-laundered items on the porch and this friend would come and collect them. She ended up doing the family's laundry for three months while my great-grandmother recuperated.

Another neighbor, a Mrs. Kern, also showed kindness during the ordeal. Elizabeth wrote: She used to come to the door every morning to see if there was anything she could get. Several times she had my father get a chicken and she cooked it so we could have the broth.

By the time Elizabeth returned from the hospital, she had lost her hair, and her youngest son didn't recognize her.

Despite the kindnesses shown by her father, sister, Mr. Walker, Mrs. Kern, the unnamed laundress, and even the visiting nurse, Elizabeth still felt that many people had abandoned the family. She seemed to think that despite the health risk, neighbors and friends should have been less frightened about getting ill and more concerned with helping the sick. According to one account, it was precisely this attitude that may have contributed to the unusually high number of cases in Globeville. Many German immigrants that lived in this neighborhood felt bound, perhaps by their culture and familial bonds, to help one another. Perhaps because of this, Globeville, along with another neighborhood, Little Italy, received a prolonged closure order even after the closure orders for the rest of Denver were lifted. But it's clear from Elizabeth's account that not everyone in the neighborhood was keen on exposing themselves to this potentially deadly illness, not even to help a sick family member or neighbor. She never forgot who helped her, and who did not.

During the first world war, Elizabeth had joined a sewing club organized by the Red Cross. They kept up the club even after the war. During the flu epidemic, Elizabeth wrote, ...some of the doctors in Denver had a meeting about the sickness, trying to find out what to do for it. One doctor that had never tended a patient in Globeville mentioned something about the foreigners there being so dirty that was the reason there were so many sicknesses. Mrs. Campbell [the wife of a local judge, and fellow member of the sewing club] told him he better take that statement back. She said she had been in a good many homes and that their floors were scrubbed cleaner than most American peoples tables. She said they were clean enough to eat off them. A doctor by the name of Taylor who was the smelter doctor for a good many years and had a good many patients there told him he agreed with her, and he had better apologize. This doctor asked [Mrs. Campbell] why she was so concerned about these people, so she told him that she knew these people and loved them and as long as she would be able, she would visit these people and do all she could for them. She became a very close friend of mine and our family.

I find this portion of my great-grandmother's memoirs interesting, because it reminds me that my family was once scorned just for being "foreign." Two, three, even four generations later, we call ourselves "American," and some members act quite privileged. I have heard certain members of my family look down upon other cultures/immigrants. It's such a shame that so many people continue to fear/scorn/push away people from other places. But you are one of them!

Anyway, more about the Flu. My great-grandmother also wrote: There were so many people dead at that time in Denver that they could not dig graves fast enough, so they laid them in trenches, until it was all over, then put them in graves.

My great-grandmother doesn't mention any of her relatives or friends dying from the flu during that time.

Elizabeth went on to have seven more children. One of those children was my grandmother.