Posted on 06/12/2016 6:24:17 AM PDT by Kaslin
My father died a few days ago. He was 100 years old.
I never met his parents, he barely knew them himself. His mother, the daughter of a Russian Jewish immigrant who fought for the Union, taught second grade in New York City public schools. She died when he was three, in the flu epidemic of 1918-1919, one of the greatest disasters in American history. A quarter of the American population, including President Wilson, caught the disease, and 700,000 died from it -- twice as many as fell in World War II. In New York City people were dying so fast that the authorities limited funerals to 15 minutes. Some of those contracting the disease died within hours, suffocated by phlegm. One of them was my grandmother. She was 38.
Grandpa’s family also came from Russia, but in the late 1800s. By the time my father was born, he owned a picture frame store at 1 East Broadway, in what is now, and was even then, becoming Chinatown. He was a famous wit, who would spend the day cracking jokes one after another to an audience of men who would stay there all day, just to listen to him. As a result, he became something of a local political force, and even knew Al Smith, who ran for president in 1928 -- the first Catholic to ever do so.
But Grandpa died of some other sickness in 1930, leaving my father to work his way through high school selling newspapers in the midst of the Depression.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
It is amazing how little the American people know about the 1918 flu epidemic.
” It is amazing how little the American people know about the 1918 flu epidemic.”
Most of us “of an age” know all too much about it. Most of us had relatives who died in it.
Yup...it got my grandpa when my mom was just four.
It's amazing how many people think the flu is just a harmless little bug. Tens of thousands in the US alone die of it every year.
Among public health officials, another pandemic like that of 1918 is a very real and frightening possibility.
Wonderful post. Thank you, Kaslin.
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