Similarities between 1918 flu, what’s happening now
It was scary for 7-year-old Delene Stromberg to come shopping in downtown Oceanside because everyone was wearing masks.
Masks were ordered, along with closure of schools, churches, theaters and assemblages.
It was 1918, and the Spanish flu had descended upon the globe just as it was wrapping up World War I.
Stromberg, granddaughter of Gerhard Schutte, one of the founders of the historic Twin Inns in Carlsbad, was telling her story 93 years later at the age of 100-plus to senior writer Wendy Hinman of Carlsbad Magazine.
It actually was a story about Elm Avenue (now Carlsbad Village Drive), and Hinman was gathering historical perspective. She repeated some of Stromberg’s reflections in a special 32-page COVID-19 issue just published by the magazine, which also includes information varying from which restaurants have takeout to how faith communities are handling the current quarantine.
Hinman said in an interview Tuesday that she had kept her notes from her talk with Stromberg and remembered the side story about the Spanish flu.
“My mother would not let me go without a mask,” Hinman quoted Stromberg as saying. “I did not want to wear one.” Hinman said Stromberg’s mother, Hattie Reece Schutte, was one of Carlsbad’s early school marms.
The family lived on a farm at the current Laguna Driveinterstate 5, Hinman said.
“It mimics what’s happening today,” Kristi Hawthorne, president of Oceanside Historical Society, also in a Tuesday interview, said of the Spanish-flu tale.
Actually, Hawthorne said, with 65 influenza cases reported in a city with a population of just under 1,200, the percentages were higher than what’s being experienced today.
Worldwide, that flu killed an estimated 50 million people. The San Diego Evening Tribune on Nov. 15, 1920, reported a total of 1 million deaths in the U.S.
On Wednesday, the U.S. total for the current coronavirus was 14,240.
Hawthorne noted a major difference in the two pandemics: the Spanish flu hit children and young people the hardest whereas the coronavirus targets the elderly more.
Oceanside’s figures, Hawthorne advised, did not include the San Luis Rey Valley, which was not part of the city at that time.
Both communities were so small that Oceanside didn’t have its first hospital until 1919.
Hawthorne said the reaction a century ago was strikingly similar to today.
City councils are declaring a state of emergency. The Oceanside Board of Trustees did likewise after the virus hit in October 1918. Residents weren’t to go out except to get groceries.
The town’s health officer, Dr. Robert S. Reid, decreed the wearing of masks, which had to have four layers of gauze and cover the nose and mouth, Hawthorne said.
Once classes began again, she said, students still had to wear masks when passing and on trains to get to school. (Oceanside High served all North County coastal communities at the time.)
And, Hawthorne said, failure to comply with the rules was reason for arrest, a fine and possible 90 days in jail.
But, the “recorder” charged with doling out the punishment, Horace E. James, was known to be extra-lenient, refusing to order the payment of the fines and calling the mask requirement “foolish,”
Hawthorne said.
Carlsbad Magazine, founded in 2004 by publisher Tim Wrisley, usually prints six issues a year. The COVID-19 edition is a special one, available in print and online.
Another Carlsbad publication, the Carlsbad Business Journal, put out by the Chamber of Commerce, added a COVID-19 theme to its regular April edition, also both print and online.
On the cover, Carolina Alban-stoughton, director of communication and engagement, adds an editor’s note stating that the 50th anniversary of Earth Week was planned as the issue’s focus until the outbreak of the virus.
The main story, titled “A Resilient Community,” has information on how local businesses are responding to the crisis, and there are other related articles as well.