National Post (National Edition)
102-year-old shares tips for weathering the pandemic
Woman survived 1918 Spanish flu, bouts of cancer
Mildred Geraldine “Gerri” Schappals is one of the few people in the world who has survived two pandemics. The 102-year-old New Englander lived through a severe bout of the flu during the 1918 Spanish flu as a baby. And now, a century later, punctuated by two bouts of cancer, Schappals also has recovered from COVID-19.
Schappals — an Irish Catholic known for her witty oneliners — is the oldest resident at the Huntington at Nashua, a retirement and assisted-living community in Nashua, N.H.
“I don’t think of myself as old,” said Schappals, who is moderately deaf and provided an interview through her daughter, Julia Schappals.
Julia Schappals, 68, calls her mother feisty and tough and “an example of a good, fighting treasure.”
She is an anomaly, and not just because of her age. The elder Schappals was not particularly health-conscious throughout her life, yet she seems to have a bulletproof immune system. She credits that to the 1918 flu pandemic, her daughter said.
“I really think that having the 1918 flu strengthened everything about me,” she said. “I never had colds or illnesses until I got cancer, and even then I pulled through. It’s either that or Mother Nature thinks I died in 1918, so she ignores me.”
Gerri Schappals was born in Worcester, Mass., on Jan. 18, 1918, when the First World War was raging, and women didn’t have the right to vote. Eleven months after she was born baby Gerri, her mother and her teenage brother, Joseph, came down with the dreaded flu.
Schappals was so ill that when her parents changed her diaper, they didn’t bother pinning it because she couldn’t move.
“Lo and behold, my mother pulled through, and so did her mother and brother,” said Julia Schappals, a semi-retired lawyer.
Family legend has it that the doctor who examined them cried because they were his only patients who survived the flu.
Her childhood is full of memories from daily life in the early 20th century, such as waking up in the summertime to the clop-clop-clop of the milkman’s horse and going to a Saturday matinee movie for 10 cents.
Her life intersected with a long-gone generation for today: Gerri Schappals remembers assemblies in elementary school in which Civil War veterans would speak. She also recalls kids reciting political chants they learned from their parents for the 1928 presidential election between Herbert Hoover and Al Smith.
She went to college and graduate school and became a teacher. She met her husband — Everett “Gus” Schappals, who was in the Navy — in Washington during the Second World War. They moved to New Hampshire in 1962, and it became the family’s permanent home. The couple had two daughters — Julia Schappals and Jade Walsh.
Gerri Schappals, who has been widowed since 1983, has three grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.
After she retired in the late 1980s, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She beat the disease, but a few years later, doctors diagnosed her with stage 3 colon cancer, from which she also recovered after surgery.
In May, she felt sick for a few days and had a spiking fever. She went to the hospital, where she got tested for the novel coronavirus. The test came back positive, but by then she was feeling better.
“I would say she’s an Amazon!” Julia Schappals said.
What is her secret to longevity?
She credits a strong immune system, avoidance of excessive worry and even her love of red wine.
She was known to say, “Jesus did not change water into wine so that I could look at it.”