Flu pandemic of 1918 shows how history does (and doesn't) repeat itself

A century ago - in the fall of 1918 - Sonoma County was ready to welcome its soldier sons and nurse and ambulance-driver daughters back home again from France with all the jubilation of victory. But it would be a muted celebration that came with the Armistice of Nov. 11, 1918, the end of the deadliest war in history.

The glow of impending victory was dimmed by the official telegrams and letters home from soldiers billeted in crowded camps. They brought word, too-often tragic, of the relentless march of this “Spanish flu” - so-called because it was incorrectly believed to have started in Spain, and because there was little or no understanding of the political damage names can do.

The “flu” part, however, was correct. It was influenza not corona. But it was a pandemic that spread through the trenches of Europe and the crowded army camps on both continents. It would ultimately result in the deaths of 50 million people - and more if you include those who died of pneumonia and/or tuberculosis in the aftermath.

World War I (the “War to End All Wars,” they called it) cost more lives than any war in history, and that flu killed more people, on both sides, than died in battle.

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THIS IS NOT an upbeat beginning for the telling of an old story. But what it tells us is that we’ve been here before - not thee and me, but our parents, grandparents, greats and great greats. These people, telling their stories, are what historians call primary sources.

They tell us how it was. As it is with all those who bear witness, they aren’t perfect. But they were there.

For some, it could be their parents remembering how the family fared. For hometown reporters and/or columnists it could be readers who shared memories; in some cases, wrote them down for generations that followed.

One of those Press Democrat readers of the 1980s was an 81-year-old woman named Frances Grimm Little who read a column about the epidemic of 1918 and wrote a three-page letter, in ink, on lavender-?colored stationary.

“I was going to the Ursuline College as it was then called, was a boarder,” she wrote. “At its early stages the Sisters told us to write our families not to visit us. Day Scholars stayed home - no school for them.

“In early 1919 I took sick. Sisters, after a bad night, called Dr. Jesse. He came at 5 a.m. In desperation he ordered the school closed and sent boarders home.

“Sisters phoned my Mom - we owned a hotel and saloon in Duncan Mills. She came down on the 1st train which got in here about ?8 a.m. There was no place to take me - no place. Finally Sr. Mary Francis suggested a building used for laundry. It had been partially destroyed in earthquake. No nurses available. Finally found one and they worked 12 hours.

“Her name was Rose Patterson. By that time Sr. Antonio and Sr. Agnes came down with it. My Mom helped during day and she returned to Occidental Hotel at night. Before she left Sr. M. Francis insisted she had a couple of straight shots.

Mom said it saved her from the flu.

“When she tried to get a nurse she took a cab to Sebastopol to see Ruth Burns who later married Judge Foley. She was busy. Then Rose Donnelly and when she went up on the porch there were three bodies waiting to be picked up. So it was a tragedy.

“Thanks for listening. Had to get it off my chest. I was 10 then.

“Sincerely,

“Francis Little (Mrs. Duffy J.)

“Excuse writing.

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ANOTHER “EYEWITNESS ACCOUNT” comes from Burgess Titus, a lifelong Santa Rosan, who wrote a little book for his family called “I Remember When” and shared it occasionally when there was a subject to weigh in on - such happy matters as his memory of standing on the street with his classmates to cheer as Henry Ford, Thomas Edison and their entourage arrived to visit Luther Burbank in 1915.

There is no cheering in his recollection of the “Spanish” flu, which came to town when he was 18.

He and his brothers, he wrote: “… would watch a wagon or a truck go slowly down Fourth Street and although we could not see the bodies under the black cloth cover, we knew there were seven or eight people under it we had known or known something about.

“It is said they were being taken to the brewery ice house to be put in cold storage until they could be properly cared for.”

“It would always seem,” he continued, “like the big strong people would be the first to fall in the scourge and many of them had come home from the War In Europe, only to be cut down by the flu bug.”

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THERE IS ANOTHER LETTER in the archive, dated January 22, 1919. It’s from a Petaluma woman named Jean (that’s all we know) to her mother. “Every place you go someone is sick,” she writes. “Haven’t been uptown since Xmas. Well, I think it best to stay away from the people as much as possible.”

Still, Jean’s outlook is positive.

“I think it will be just a little while and the flu will be checked. It seems it has to take its coarse.”

Then, as if to indicate the last, definitive word on the subject, she writes a recipe to her mother, copying “the best receipt for corn bread I ever saw” and sings the praise of a gooseberry pie she made for her husband Frank.

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ALREADY KNOWN AND FEARED from sad letters sent by young men in the service - and all too often, by the government - influenza officially “arrived” at a road workers camp near Cotati where men building Highway 101 were reported “down.”

Next was the news from the Salvation Army’s orphanage at Lytton, where the children “took sick” at the rate of 75 a day until more than half of the ?250 children there had become ill.

When 10-year-old Helen Groul died there on Oct. 16, hers was the first fatality in the county from the epidemic.

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WE BEGAN WITH STATISTICS, so we end with statistics.

Worldwide the effects were staggering.

Beginning, officially, in Sonoma County on the first week of October in 1918 and ending in the first days of February 1919, the epidemic would kill 175 of the county’s 50,000 residents in four months.

What happened here and in the world that fall and winter of 1918-19 can make it sound like history does indeed repeat itself. But it doesn’t.

We don’t need to list all the ways that the world - the science, communication, the technology are different. And that makes us different as well - in both good and not so good ways.

We don’t have time to argue about things like that. We have to go wash our hands.