Covid-19: Spanish Flu

Kim the other evening, in her fourth installment of “Writing in the Time of Covid-19,” wrote about her grandmother, whose 110th birthday was that day. She shared a recipe for coffee cake, and then segued into the Spanish influenza, her grandmother having been alive then—eight years old.

My mother at age 3; this was
a "glamor shot" from the
orphanage, for prospective
parents (I believe)

 Which made me think about my parents. My father was ten in 1918, and right around then (I think) freshly relocated from Chicago to Milwaukee, freshly fatherless (divorce). It must have been a terrifying time for his mother, as she sought to make her own way—running a boarding house, I believe. My father sold newspapers on a street corner to help her out. (That’s the myth. And maybe it’s true.) My mother was four, newly adopted (for the second and final time) and no longer at the Children’s Home Society orphanage.
 I never heard any stories from them about that time. The only inklings I have feel like rumors, innuendos. They didn’t want to remember back, I’m sure. They’d moved on.
 When I mentioned in a comment on Kim’s post that I heard no stories about the Spanish flu, she remarked: “Maybe they just got diluted over the years, because so many more stories steamrolled out—the wars, the dramatic stock market crash and subsequent depression. So many stories from the first half of the last century.”
 I know my parents got married in 1936, and came to California three years later, which would have been just after the Great Depression ended. But my father would have been starting in grad school as it hit. Maybe students were immune? He did go into chemical engineering, at Standard Oil in Illinois, as a career, to begin with—and maybe that was also immune? I know not everyone got slapped on their ass during the depression. And then he was hired at UCLA. That must have felt like liberation. But I really know so little about . . . well, so much. And now they’re not around to answer questions.

 Well, if I had kids and they wanted to know about my early years, I wouldn’t have any interesting stories to tell—none about race riots (which I wasn’t a part of) or antiwar marches (ditto) or women’s lib (ditto), or any of the stuff that went on in the sixties and seventies. I was busy in school. Focused. Or oblivious. Those can mean the same thing.
 Of course I was aware that our leaders were getting killed, and I was horrified. I remember a friend in 1968, when I was in ninth grade, saying in home room that it was a good thing RFK had been killed. I was horrified at that, too. Glad that someone was dead? And . . . someone good? That may have been my first conscious introduction to “the other side” (i.e., Republicans). I assume her remark reflected her parents’ opinions, and their influence on an obedient child. (They were LDS: institutional obedience to boot.) But still.
 Anyway, yeah: I don’t have much personal to say about the civil rights movement or the Vietnam war or much of anything social-political that was going on back then. And I expect my parents didn’t have much to say about the Spanish influenza (they were pretty young), or maybe even the depression. Catastrophes hit people all sorts of ways.
 My parents’ catastrophe was my father’s chemical lab accident in 1944 doing war research. That was a doozy: he remained in and out of hospitals for the next ten years. But he recovered, and had a good long career as a professor, until cancer got him, in his late sixties. He died at the age of seventy. I was 23.
 I’ve been extraordinarily blessed to not have had many tragedies in my life—the deaths of a few people I loved, some of them way too early, are what I count especially. As I write that, I’m crossing my fingers. Hoping no other shoes are poised to drop.