How 1919 arrived amid a pandemic
It’s hard for anyone to resist looking back at the start of a new year. I just can’t help looking way, way back.
We last checked in on how our 1918 ancestors were dealing with a worldwide pandemic as we approached Election Day. State health officials were trying to attack the socalled “Spanish Flu” with poetry, sneezing was forbidden in churches, barbers scoffed at masks and bodies piled up due to a shortage of gravediggers.
Now that we’ve reached the new year, let’s set the Wayback Machine ( aka, newspaper archives) to see how 1919 arrived.
In with a bang
Keeping in mind that celebrants on New Year’s Eve 1919 were much closer in vintage to the Wild West than to today, it’s still alarming that they shot bullets so cavalierly that ammunition smashed windows of homes throughout Stamford.
In the city’s Cove neighborhood, all outdoor electric bulbs were destroyed, leaving everyone in the dark.
Police were able to snare one gunman. He was fined $ 7 and released. He would be treated much more harshly today, leaving hope that perhaps sensible gun safety laws will be commonplace by the next century.
Champagne glass half full
Influenza raged, but hey, World War I was over, so a headline declared “Local Business Men Seem Happy over Prospects in 1919.”
The story about a Kiwanis Club meeting revealed the chapter president’s strategy for checking the spread of the disease: Stay healthy.
“To attain success we must have healthy bodies. If a business is in bankruptcy it is not a success.”
A century before Amazon, he urged residents to buy local.
“There are good stocks of groceries and dry- goods here. Why should one run to New York for every little purchase?”
Bleak times for swine
While hogs were reportedly dying by the thousands on farms in Illinois due to influenza, some of their counterparts in the East were municipal employees.
Stamford Mayor John Treat pitched several initiatives for the new year, including a more modern way to dispose of garbage than the city’s method of burying it.
“Very disagreeable odors arise from the condition,” Treat observed.
He proposed trying innovations from other towns, such as feeding garbage to swine.
A flaming cure?
One dispatch reported that men who work in blast furnaces were free from influenza.
Free verse not worth it
Alas, shaky verse remained a strategy of the medical community. The Boston health director offered this “first shot” from his “rhythmatic pen”:
Mary had a little cold,
That started in her head,
And everywhere that Mary went
That cold was sure to spread
... The teacher tried to drive it out;
She tried hard, but — kerchoo!
It didn’t do a bit of good, For teacher caught it, too.
Holy cow
W. B. Yeats wasn’t feeling much of a threat, but let’s not mock a generation that makes today’s look as fragile as a stormtrooper ( the galactic variety, not the ones that had just been toppled in WWI).
Consider this dispatch about a household of 18 in Charlton, Massachusetts:
All but two people in the home came down with influenza. One was a baby of 1. The other was 17year- old Julia Tiberil. Each day, Julia tended to the sick, nursed the baby, did the chores and most of the cooking, milked 10 cows and lugged the moo juice 2 miles to catch the milk train.
Think about that next time you snarl about running low on Netflix offerings.
Couldn’t wait for Valentine’s Day
Greenwich’s Louis Mendelson, 85, who made his fortune as a tailor ( and a side gig as a “curer of stammering”) lost his second wife to influenza around Thanksgiving.
He was told 48- year- old Lena Weinstein was “the woman he was looking for,” so he paid her a visit on Christmas. They were wed the next day.
The Stamford Advocate reported “The marriage of Thursday had a rude jar on Saturday.”
( Side note, I may henceforth routinely crib the phrase “rude jar,” as in “2021 took a rude jar on Inauguration Day”).
In this case, the disturbance resulted from the new Mrs. Mendelson asking for all of his property. Louis took action to have “the knot untied” in Superior Court in Bridgeport upon the arrival of 1919.
Perhaps on Valentine’s Day, I’ll set the Wayback Machine to further explore “The Life and Loves of Louis Mendelson.” Nine years before this misadventure, he claimed to already be over 80 when his daughter was born. In June of 1919 he claimed to be only 62 after he was arrested over an affair with a 25- year- old New York manicurist to whom he promised $ 29 million and gifted with a watch he boasted was given to him by Napoleon Bonaparte’s grandson. So basically, he sounds like a rascal who would be played by Bill Murray in a Wes Anderson flick.
Grim realities
Tragedy + Time = levity for some the daily news of 1919, but much of it remains sobering.
There are countless illustrations of how rapidly the disease devastated families. Ponder two:
A mother of four children ages 2- 6 died after taking care of ill neighbors. She is described as very popular. Her death draws scores of neighborhood children to her home on Stamford’s Spruce Street.
Edward Davey, his wife and 11- year- old daughter were healthy as they celebrated Christmas in 1918. His wife fell ill and died within days as he tried to care for her. On New Year’s Day, he was gone as well.
Picture an 11- year- old celebrating Christmas with her parents, only to be orphaned New Year’s Day. As 1919 began, the Middletown Press reported that more than “600 innocent children have been left homeless by the ravages of the influenza epidemic.”
No amount of time can reverse such tragedies, but empathy and discipline can change the future.
John Breunig is editorial page editor of the Stamford Advocate and Greenwich Time. jbreunig@ scni. com; 203- 964- 2281; twitter. com/ johnbreunig