Month: February 2004

Family Paradoxes

In continuing the previous story, sometime near the first days of October, 1918 Nellie was taken to Clemmie and Mary to be her surrogate mother. At the time this was thought to be a temporary, but sad to say it was for an extended for a very long time. After Ara died, I am sure J. W. and James Samuel moved back into the main house with the rest of the family. That did not last long James Samuel died within a few days of Ara. Nellie has told me that F. H. hardly never spoke to her positively or negatively. Her care was in the hands of Clemmie, Mary. and
J. W. At the time Nellie and J.W. moved back into the main home Clemmie was 26, J.W. 24 Barnett 21, Arthur 17. Mary 15. Barnett had married Roberta Buckner in June of 1918 he and Roberta both were living with in the old family house. I have no information to substantiate my claim but I am sure Barnett and Roberta moved into the Cabin after J.W.’s family moved out. All living condition remained the same until October 1921 J.W. married Mary Highbaugh. Mary moved into the Family house with all the others. At some time in 1921 the family had purchased the farm they were living on. This made it possible for them to build a house on the farm they owned. Sometime in the year of 1922 J.W.’s Father-in-Law started building a house for J.W. and Mary. The house was completed J.W. and Mary move into the new home. The big question, Was Nellie moving with them or was she staying with Clemmie, Mary, F.H. & Arthur. Mary “Jim” said nobody knew what was going to happen in this matter and nobody was directing her either way. After a few trips to and fro Nellie joined J.W. and Mary and she had made her decision.

Clemmie was around 30 years old at this time, her efforts to find a suitor had been blocked many times by F. H. so she remained a maid her entire life. I must say I know less about Clemmie that anyone one of the family that includes Barnett who died when I was nine years old. Clemmie live another six years I still did not get to know her like the others. I is my belief that Clemmie did not have the constitutional self-will to confront her father as the other four did.

There you have the paradox a five year old child can decide where she wishes to live, however a 30 year old woman was not allowed to get married.
Author: harold

1918 FLU PANDEMIC

The review gave me some information that I never was privy to until I started work on the reunion and was trying to come up with information about our family. This is the information that came to me from family members. Late 1917 WW1 started J. W. was 23 and Barnett was 20 both eligible for the draftJ.W. was married and had a child but my information is that was not a factor. He was still subject to the draft. Some time during the next 10 months both J.W. and Barnet were called to be examined physically. J. W. failed the physical because of problems resulting from infantile paralysis, but Barnet passed his physical and was awaiting the draft. As fall came in 1918 Barnet was waiting to be inducted into the US Army. As the review below suggest something more horrific happened. The review stated the Army was so devastated by the pandemic that by October draft was suspended. This information is compatible with the information given me by my family.

When October came J. W., Ara & Nellie were living in the Cabin. Ara was ready to give birth her second child. I do not know when the flu really hit the Hammondsville area. The review show the nation was hard hit from Mid-September to Mid-December. On October 15, 1918 Ara gave birth to James Samuel. Ara died of the flu a few days later (I do not have the exact date). James Samuel died November 7, 1917 23 days after his birth. These are the only two deaths that I know by name in the Hammondsville area although Mary Ard Cruse told me that no pregnant woman nor her baby survive the flu in that three months in that area. Also I heard someone say that Dr. Mark Lively was afraid to treat people with this illness. They said he would just they have the flu I cannot help then leave.

After reading this book review I see a little more clearly why we did not hear very much about the pandemic. The newspaper were not too forthright in the way they reported the era in our history. The absence of information on this subject has been very baffling to me. About the other facts that I have been able to put together has been the following: While working in the funeral supply business in Eastern PA in the eighties I was reading an article in the American Funeral Director about this subject they stated 22,000,000 deaths worldwide, noting the World Book stated 20,000,000 death world wide. Now I note the number is 50,000,000 to 100,000,000. As stated above I was working in Eastern PA about 90 miles from Philadelphia. The book notes the city heaviest hit was Philadelphia. The business next door to the place I was working was the Schuylkill Casket Co., a business founded during those three months in 1918 to take care of the death due to the flu. I think I will buy the book and catch up on this subject.

A TIMELY ACCOUNT OF THE 1918 FLU PANDEMIC
Author(s):    Michael Kenney, Globe Correspondent Date: February 11, 2004 Page: D8 Section: Living
The flu season started early last fall, with deaths being reported before many people even thought about getting their shots. By the time they did, there were warnings of a vaccine shortage. Now comes February, the peak month for what the Centers for Disease Control calls ” influenza activity.” Even in a non-epidemic season, the CDC estimates that 36,000 Americans will die from influenza .

All this, plus recent reports of avian flu spreading through Southeast Asian chicken flocks, reaching the United States, and beginning to infect humans, makes John M. Barry’s “The Great Influenza ,” a sobering account of the 1918 flu epidemic, compelling and timely. The 1918 pandemic took a staggering toll – worldwide, 50 million to 100 million lives; in the United States, 675,000. More people died from mid-September to early December in 1918 than have died of AIDS in its 24-year scourge, Barry notes.

When the flu struck in 1918, it was killing, Barry writes, “in some new and awful way.” As an internal Red Cross report put it, the flu spread “a fear and panic . . . akin to the terror of the Middle Ages regarding the Black Plague.” Barry’s descriptions of the disease’s ravages are gruesome.

Barry’s is the second major book dealing with the 1918 pandemic in the past five years. The earlier one – which, curiously, Barry does not cite – by New York Times science reporter Gina Kolata, focused on the still ongoing scientific research into its cause.

Barry, on the other hand, is a historian – his book “Rising Tide,” an account of the 1927 Mississippi flood, won the Francis Parkman Prize – and the great strengths of his latest book lie in its accounts of the epidemic’s origin, its devastating spread through US Army training camps, and its impact on civilian life.

While many flu viruses, this season’s included, originate in Asia, Barry offers a persuasive argument that the 1918 epidemic began, mysteriously, in rural Haskell County, Kansas, early that year. “Evidence further suggests,” Barry writes, “that this virus traveled east across the state to a huge army base.”

At Camp Devens in Ayer, as an Army report put it, “the influenza . . . occurred as an explosion.” On a single day in September, 1,543 men reported ill with influenza .

The situation was similar at other camps – at Camp Custer in Michigan, 2,800 troops reported ill in one day; at Camp Grant in Illinois, more than 100 men died in a single day in October, and the camp’s commander killed himself as the toll passed 500.

Initially, the Army refused to stop shipping troops from one camp to another or overseas on troop ships that became death ships. When the Army’s provost marshal canceled the October draft order, Barry writes, “he did so only because he recognized that the disease was utterly overwhelming and creating total chaos in the cantonments.”

Inevitably, the disease spread into the civilian population. As Barry writes, “The war had come home.”

“It was a common practice in 1918,” Barry writes, “for people to hang a [ribbon] of crepe on the door to mark a death in the house. There was crepe everywhere.” In Philadelphia – where 254 people died on Oct. 5 and 289 the next day – a man said that on one street, it “looked like every other house had crepe over the door.”

In Washington, a man remembered, “it kept people apart. . . . People were afraid to kiss one another, people were afraid to eat with one another, they were afraid to have anything that made contact because that’s how you got the flu.” A New Haven man, recalling “the same isolating fear,” wrote that when someone fell sick, instead of family and friends “bringing food over. . . . nobody was coming in, nobody would bring food in, nobody came to visit.”

Barry criticizes the press for its failure to report what was happening. He cites a number of instances when a newspaper reported the onset of influenza in another state or city, but did not report deaths in its own city. “As terrifying as the disease was,” Barry writes, “the press made it worse. They terrified by making little of it, for what officials and the press said bore no relationship to what people saw and touched and smelled and endured.”

It would seem improbable to see the 1918 pandemic, as Barry does, as “a case study” with lessons for the present. After all, we now have vaccines, which did not exist in 1918 – even if they must await the appearance of a virus to be created. And medical reporting is now responsible and hard-hitting. Still, the CDC estimates that in a new epidemic with a virus as deadly as that of in 1918, the US death toll “will most likely fall between 89,000 and 300,000

This book review came to me via Doline from the Courier Journal, but they did not put on line so you with note it came from the Boston Globe.
Author: harold

Jim Crow Logic

The story below was edited by my son and he left this note at the bottom (This story is a bit unclear. I have no idea what the point is) I have taken this as the age in which he grew up in and the time my mother’s brothers grew up. I would like to hear your thoughts. Ellis Brooks was born a slave. It is said he lived with and cared for the family that held him in involuntary servitude before the Civil War until their death. He married a woman much his junior and they had three sons: John, George, and Jim. Ellis and his wife lived across the road from the church. C. D. Highbaugh lived with his mother at the home of G. W. Highbaugh. C. D. had three sons near the same age. Paul, Maxie, and Robert (my mother’s brothers). One time a few years ago, Uncle Maxie told me he and his brother went north to a white school and Ellis’s boys went south to a black school. Uncle Maxie noted they threw rocks at each other both morning and afternoon. Then on Saturday, they went to Bacon Creek behind Ellis’s home and stripped off buck-naked and went swimming. Uncle Maxie said he thought that combination of behavior was a little strange. Not swimming naked. That was normal for young boys in Hammondville back then. Rev. John Brooks, (the son of Ellis.) (Harold writes: John Brooks was a preacher same age as my mother born 1897. I think he was still living in 1999. George Brooks might have been older than John. He was a bank guard in Louisville and was murdered in late 1950’s. I met him once. Jim Brooks was born 1908-1912 and was a WWII Veteran. He died of a heart attack in the late 1960’s. Jim and John were a big part of my life.)
Author: harold

Three Blondes

Three blondes (natural) died and found themselves standing before St. Peter. He told them that before they could enter the Kingdom, they had to tell him what Easter was.

The first blonde said, “Easter is a holiday where they have a big feast and we give thanks and eat turkey.”St. Peter said, “Noooooo,” and he banished her to hell.

The second blonde said, “Easter is when we celebrate Jesus’ birth and exchange gifts.”

St. Peter said, “Noooooo,” and he banished her to hell.

The third blonde said, she knew what Easter is, and St. Peter said, “So, tell me.”

She said, “Easter is a Christian holiday that coincides with the Jewish festival of Passover. Jesus was having Passover feast with His disciples when he was betrayed by Judas, and the Romans arrested him. The Romans hung Him on the cross and eventually He died. Then they buried Him in a tomb behind a
very large boulder …
St. Peter said, “Verrrrrry good.”

Then the blonde continued, “Now every year the Jews roll away the boulder and Jesus comes out. If he sees his shadow, we have six more weeks of basketball.”

St. Peter fainted.

Author: harold

Elderly woman mauled by pit bull

Why do I post such thing? Because the police do not have time to deal with the this they gotta arrest drug dealers. Thats what we asked them to do. A judge in Florida let a man out of prison, then the crimimal raped and killed a child. Do not blame the judge we got our prisons full of pot smokers we do not have room for child killers they are second priority. John Walsh on America’s Most Wanted yells like a screaming puppy about our system do not keep harden criminals locked up. Well folks it is not about our court system it is about what we ask them to do. Okay just read the previous post and that is what you are asking them to do. A fellow could get mad about such imbecilic thinking.bad news
Author: harold

Anatomy of a drug bust

Read a little of this story (headline in our local newspaper) Just tell me what problems are we solving. Then let me tell you what problems we are creating. These Storm Troppers tatics on our citizens must stop. The only, I mean only way is to legalize and regulate drugs. I would like to know how many bootleggers were in Lee County in 1930 and how many we have now. Alcohol is sold in an orderly fashion in Tupelo, without all this legal violence. God help us, this not he way to insure domestic TranquilityInsure domestic tranquaility
Author: harold

Drug Policy is Polities, not Science

My 28 years of close attention to alcoholics and drug addicts (amateur for sure) lead me to believe. As a matter of public concern, the only way to end the violence against the public and against users of drugs is to allow alcoholics and drugs addicts to use at their choice (not minors). The public should then focus upon the misbehavior the person does that disrupts our society. Stop this stupid idea that we can stop a alcoholic or drugs addict from using drug thus our problem is solved. This will end the problem that has been going on since Noah got off the ark and started stomping grapes.
Any right thinking 4 year old believes if his father did not drink, his father would not hang around with unsavory characters beat his mother or beat him maybe some of his siblings. He is told if his father did not drink his life would be better. As he gets older he is told repeatedly that do not use drug or alcohol by teacher relatives ministers, social workers. He is told often and harshly do not drink or use drugs. Then he become a teenage and his peers tell him it is ok to drink. Within 35 seconds he is better looking that Matt Damon , stronger Mike Tyson, funnier than Jay Leno and he is also positive that all who said he should not drink has lied to him.

Let us go back to the original thought, if his father did not drink. Let us live in the now he does drink and our lives do need revolve around the fact that his father drinks .
Author: harold