The annual flu season of 1918 started in the Spring. As flu seasons go, it was relatively mild; those who became ill typically suffered through a several days of chills and fever, then recovered. The number of reported deaths was low. A year earlier, on April 6, 1917, the United States had entered the Great War, and news of major offensives in Europe, not the flu, dominated the headlines. As summer approached, the flu subsided as usual.
Then, on August 11, the Norwegian vessel Bergensfjord docked at a Brooklyn NY pier. Twenty-one of those aboard - 10 passengers and 11 crew members - were ill. A team of doctors and city officials, having been warned in advance, were on hand to meet the ship and quickly sent those where were ill to nearby hospitals. The first few cases of what turned out to be one of the deadliest pandemics in human history had landed in New York City.
Then, on August 11, the Norwegian vessel Bergensfjord docked at a Brooklyn NY pier. Twenty-one of those aboard - 10 passengers and 11 crew members - were ill. A team of doctors and city officials, having been warned in advance, were on hand to meet the ship and quickly sent those where were ill to nearby hospitals. The first few cases of what turned out to be one of the deadliest pandemics in human history had landed in New York City.
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Despite efforts at containment - the pier was immediately placed under strict quarantine - the disease started to spread, insidiously at first, but soon sweeping through the city’s densely-populated neighborhoods like wildfire. Unlike its earlier incarnation, this second wave turned out to be a merciless beast. The first death in New York City was recorded about a month after the Bergensfjord arrived, by the first of October the daily death toll had reached around 50, and by the middle of the month over 400 people were dying each day. October of 1918 was the deadliest month of the entire epidemic. Eventually over 20,000 lost their lives.
And a singularly unpleasant death it was. The historian Mike Wallace described “patients gasping for breath as their lungs filled with bloody frothy fluid.” Within days or even hours, they basically drowned in their own bloody fluids. Victims could awake feeling fine and be dead by midnight.
Consistent with the usual demographic pattern, children under five and adults over seventy were at elevated risk. Unlike most influenza epidemics, however, healthy young adults between the ages of 20 and 40 were also highly susceptible to infection and suffered by far the highest mortality rates, with pregnant women being at the highest risk of dying if infected. Amazingly, except for individuals over 70, older adults, the group upon which the flu usually preys most heavily, were largely spared, producing an unusual W-shaped death curve - likely because some similar but less lethal bug had struck during their childhood and conferred lingering immunity.
And a singularly unpleasant death it was. The historian Mike Wallace described “patients gasping for breath as their lungs filled with bloody frothy fluid.” Within days or even hours, they basically drowned in their own bloody fluids. Victims could awake feeling fine and be dead by midnight.
Consistent with the usual demographic pattern, children under five and adults over seventy were at elevated risk. Unlike most influenza epidemics, however, healthy young adults between the ages of 20 and 40 were also highly susceptible to infection and suffered by far the highest mortality rates, with pregnant women being at the highest risk of dying if infected. Amazingly, except for individuals over 70, older adults, the group upon which the flu usually preys most heavily, were largely spared, producing an unusual W-shaped death curve - likely because some similar but less lethal bug had struck during their childhood and conferred lingering immunity.
* * * * *
Sometime between May 6, when my grandfather gave a concert in Rumford Hall on Worth Street in lower Manhattan, and September 12, when he was issued a draft card in Massachusetts (in response to an August 1918 amendment to the Selective Service Act raising the upper age limit for eligibility), my father and his parents moved from their densely populated Brooklyn neighborhood the relatively quiet town of Randolph, a suburb of Boston.
During the dark moments we are all living through today, it occurred to me to wonder whether the Great Influenza played any part in their decision to leave Brooklyn. Historically, even when contagion was less well understood, people realized that crowded conditions might contribute to the spread of disease and city-dwellers who could afford to do so often fled to less crowded areas when a pandemic struck.
Public health officials anticipated from the start that New York would be severely affected by the Great Influenza. It was a large port city whose population had mushroomed due to recent waves of immigration. Many of its doctors were overseas fighting World War I, which at the time appeared to have no end in sight though in fact it ended rather abruptly with the Armistice on November 11 of 1918. The installation of subways and elevated trains created a brand new phenomenon, “rush hour.” New York was a center for international travel and shipping and the departure point for more than a million troops headed for battlefields in France. In short, New York was a veritable breeding ground for the flu, and Brooklyn was at its center.
If ever a family had targets painted on their backs, it was the Stodolas. Edwin was about to turn 33 and Beatrice was 28 (the modal or peak age for mortality in the 1918 pandemic), her pregnancy putting her and her unborn child in even graver danger. My father, aged three, was also in a high-risk category.
The likelihood of my grandparents having known what was coming in time to stay ahead of the fast-moving tsunami, however, is low. Front-page news focused on the Great War, while reports on the Great Influenza were buried or absent. And not just by chance; countries engaged in fighting actively suppressed news of the outbreak to avoid undermining morale. (Because Spain was not at war, the Spanish press wrote freely about it - hence the misnomer "Spanish flu.") When the approaching infection could no longer be ignored, local officials, abetted by the press, typically reassured the public either that it wasn't really the Spanish flu or that the worst was over. Not until people saw their friends, neighbors, and family members dying before their eyes, dying horribly, did they recognize the disconnect between what they were being told and reality.
If against all odds Edwin and Beatrice were somehow cognizant enough of their plight to entertain the hope that moving to a less densely populated suburban area would improve their chances of surviving the pandemic, they were quite simply mistaken. The Boston area per se was hardly a haven from the flu. In fact it struck the port of Boston even before it arrived in New York; indeed, in the end, the death rate from influenza in Boston was even higher than in New York. Nor did the suburbs provide any refuge. Except for a few communities that were either smart enough or fortunate enough to achieve true isolation from the outside world, there was nowhere to hide from the Great Influenza. In fact, there is no evidence for either Boston or New York that the suburbs fared better than more densely populated urban areas.
During the dark moments we are all living through today, it occurred to me to wonder whether the Great Influenza played any part in their decision to leave Brooklyn. Historically, even when contagion was less well understood, people realized that crowded conditions might contribute to the spread of disease and city-dwellers who could afford to do so often fled to less crowded areas when a pandemic struck.
Public health officials anticipated from the start that New York would be severely affected by the Great Influenza. It was a large port city whose population had mushroomed due to recent waves of immigration. Many of its doctors were overseas fighting World War I, which at the time appeared to have no end in sight though in fact it ended rather abruptly with the Armistice on November 11 of 1918. The installation of subways and elevated trains created a brand new phenomenon, “rush hour.” New York was a center for international travel and shipping and the departure point for more than a million troops headed for battlefields in France. In short, New York was a veritable breeding ground for the flu, and Brooklyn was at its center.
If ever a family had targets painted on their backs, it was the Stodolas. Edwin was about to turn 33 and Beatrice was 28 (the modal or peak age for mortality in the 1918 pandemic), her pregnancy putting her and her unborn child in even graver danger. My father, aged three, was also in a high-risk category.
The likelihood of my grandparents having known what was coming in time to stay ahead of the fast-moving tsunami, however, is low. Front-page news focused on the Great War, while reports on the Great Influenza were buried or absent. And not just by chance; countries engaged in fighting actively suppressed news of the outbreak to avoid undermining morale. (Because Spain was not at war, the Spanish press wrote freely about it - hence the misnomer "Spanish flu.") When the approaching infection could no longer be ignored, local officials, abetted by the press, typically reassured the public either that it wasn't really the Spanish flu or that the worst was over. Not until people saw their friends, neighbors, and family members dying before their eyes, dying horribly, did they recognize the disconnect between what they were being told and reality.
If against all odds Edwin and Beatrice were somehow cognizant enough of their plight to entertain the hope that moving to a less densely populated suburban area would improve their chances of surviving the pandemic, they were quite simply mistaken. The Boston area per se was hardly a haven from the flu. In fact it struck the port of Boston even before it arrived in New York; indeed, in the end, the death rate from influenza in Boston was even higher than in New York. Nor did the suburbs provide any refuge. Except for a few communities that were either smart enough or fortunate enough to achieve true isolation from the outside world, there was nowhere to hide from the Great Influenza. In fact, there is no evidence for either Boston or New York that the suburbs fared better than more densely populated urban areas.
No place to hide: A field hospital in Brookline, one of several suburban Boston towns in which my grandparents lived during their stay in Masachusetts.
Rather, my grandparents' move was probably motivated by a desire for a more suburban lifestyle for their growing family, a preemptive job offer for Edwin, or both. They had already endured a serious health scare in the summer of 2016, a polio epidemic that infected thousands and killed more than two thousand in New York City, mostly in Brooklyn. With my father approaching his fourth birthday and their second son, Quentin, due in mid-October, their current quarters may well have been feeling cramped. It was time to look around - perhaps for a place where their children could have a yard to play in, where the family might even adopt a dog!
 Beatrice with King and baby Quentin. |  King and his enormous dog Sandy. |
In this context, my grandfather either found or was recruited for a job as a Private Secretary at the recently-opened Boston branch of the National Industrial Conference Board. The NICB had been founded in 1916 in New York to help mollify labor unrest following the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911. The organization turned out to be as liberal as pro-management organizations ever get. During the time my grandfather worked there, the NICB conducted and published groundbreaking research on worker’s compensation and the 8-hour workday and developed the Cost of Living Index. (Much later, Alan Greenspan began his career at the NICB.) Today it might be called a think-tank, and it may have been my grandfather’s introduction to the publishing business. This new job would explain their choice of New England, a place to which to the best of my knowledge neither of my grandparents had any previous connection.
How did my grandparents and their children manage to survive the Great Influenza? Did they catch a milder version during the initial Spring wave, when they were in Brooklyn, that protected them from the deadlier version that came roaring back in the Fall? Did one or more of them contract the flu that raged around them shortly after they arrived in Massachusetts - but recover? Was it pure luck?
Despite my grandmother's proclivity for journaling and letter-writing, I have yet to find a word in the family archives that might shed some light on this issue. Many have likewise remarked on how little mention the Great Influenza has received, in either the history books or in literature, either contemporaneously or later. Only recently, in the wake of several other pandemics or would-be pandemics, and now in the light of the coronovirus crisis, has this lost pandemic begun to receive the scientific and historic attention it deserves.
How did my grandparents and their children manage to survive the Great Influenza? Did they catch a milder version during the initial Spring wave, when they were in Brooklyn, that protected them from the deadlier version that came roaring back in the Fall? Did one or more of them contract the flu that raged around them shortly after they arrived in Massachusetts - but recover? Was it pure luck?
Despite my grandmother's proclivity for journaling and letter-writing, I have yet to find a word in the family archives that might shed some light on this issue. Many have likewise remarked on how little mention the Great Influenza has received, in either the history books or in literature, either contemporaneously or later. Only recently, in the wake of several other pandemics or would-be pandemics, and now in the light of the coronovirus crisis, has this lost pandemic begun to receive the scientific and historic attention it deserves.
* * * * *
My grandparents remained in Massachusetts until 1925, by which time their third son Sidney (born in 1920) and my grandmother’s parents Arthur and Vergetta King had also joined the household. They then moved to Kingsport, Tennessee, where my grandfather had landed a job with a printing press. Life in Kingsport, however, lacked the liberal spirit they found congenial and the cultural amenities they enjoyed. Just a few years later they returned to Brooklyn so their three sons could take advantage of New York City’s excellent educational system.
Their seven year sojourn in Massachusetts was clearly a happy time for my father, and apparently for the whole family. Presumably it was during this period that my grandparents discovered and fell in love with Cape Cod. They eventually bought and refurbished a small cottage in Wellfleet that my grandmother christened Shining Sands, where my sisters and I spent many idyllic summer vacations during our childhood.
Their seven year sojourn in Massachusetts was clearly a happy time for my father, and apparently for the whole family. Presumably it was during this period that my grandparents discovered and fell in love with Cape Cod. They eventually bought and refurbished a small cottage in Wellfleet that my grandmother christened Shining Sands, where my sisters and I spent many idyllic summer vacations during our childhood.
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