The current crisis makes me want to share this account of my Grandpa Brown’s experience of the 1918 flu pandemic. I wrote it after interviewing members of my extended family.

Oreal Brown was a coal miner. The family is from Carbon, Indiana.

“The Army and World War I shattered any dreams Grandpa might have had for pro baseball. He survived the slaughter in Europe and came home to more death. Influenza, the worldwide epidemic, incubated in the army camps of Europe, had already reached Carbon. By the winter of 1919, the Carbon cemetery had been expanded several times to hold the newly dead. Grandpa watched his father and then his older brother John slip away, gasping and wheezing in the final hours, ‘foaming like a steam engine,’ as one sister wrote. Grandpa’s nieces and nephews, aunts and cousins and friends died as well.

“Then Grandpa got the flu too, mild at first and rapidly more severe as pneumonia developed. His sisters lowered him again and again into a zinc tub filled with freezing water to bring down his temperature. Grandpa survived with a permanently weakened lung, an organ that he punished all the rest of his life with coal dust and unfiltered Camels. He never stopped coughing.”

Phil Hoose

Portland

 

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