Written on 2014-04-25

The Spanish Influenza – 1918-1919

My Grandma Duncan was born in 1896, Marie Hindley. I don’t remember her ever telling us much of her early life, except that she worked in a shoe store at one time and bragged that she only read one book her entire life. I will need to ask my Aunt Jeanne, her daughter, for some more details. But the story which is the start of these stories of mine and the one I remember the most is about the Spanish Influenza of 1918. It is surprising to me how little is known today of this pandemic which is estimated to have killed 50 to 100 million people worldwide in less than a year, from 1918 through 1919. Men returning from World War I carried the disease home. Pittsburgh, where I was born and raised, was said to have had over 50,000 cases at a time when the entire population was not even 600,000. Bodies were picked up in front of homes by the funeral wagons and awaited burial until coffins could be shipped in by railroad.

Grandma would have been about 24 years old. She told of a funeral director, who each day, led the procession down the streets. He would see a little girl, staring down from the second floor. After a week or so, he didn’t see her. Becoming concerned, he and the authorities entered the apartment. They found her little body, fallen by the window, where she had sat. The rest of her family, who had obviously died before she did, was found in the other rooms.