With pandemic, what's old is new again ... sort of

Saturday night sauna visits with Great-Uncle Krigsholm and the Reed and Koivisto grandparents included tales of past epidemics that killed family members or neighbors.

Average life expectancy in 1918 wasn’t much past age 50. People who died in their 70s or 80s were few and far between — 50 was old age and 80 was ancient.

I wrote for the Barnum Herald while I was in high school in Barnum and at the University of Minnesota Duluth. I scoured back issues and wrote a weekly column entitled “The Good Old Days.” It noted events and interesting tidbits from the old newspapers.

My father, Arnold, was quite interested in the information but he asked about the name of the column. He said that they were tough times to make a living and life was short. Today is the best days human beings have lived, he said. Medical care gives a man hope, he said. He went on: We have a strong social support system that covers people who get into trouble. Jobs are easier than all the handwork of the old days. There is strong support to get our youth educated for a changing workforce.

The early settlers of the area were large families that kept the farm going. Death claimed usually half of the family in childhood. Charlie Mattson came to homestead in Automba Township around 1890. In a very common story, there is a humble cemetery at the edge of one of their fields, now covered by evergreens, where three or four babies or small children lie in their final resting spot. A fieldstone marked each grave. There was at one time a picket fence, and someone would bring artificial flowers. There has been no activity since I was a young teenager besides nature relentlessly taking back this human footprint.

What caused their deaths? A woman worked hard on the farm right up to the day her baby was born. It had an impact on a child’s chance for survival. Often, a long hard labor would take both baby and mother.

But common illnesses in the world of the 1890s, before regular inoculations, exposed babies to cholera, measles, mumps, smallpox, meningitis, polio, pneumonia and tuberculosis, to name a few.

The American frontier scene had changed by 1918 — the world now saw train travel and automobiles. This was the time of three major forces on the people of Carlton County — the first World War, the 1918 fire, and the so-called Spanish flu, a worldwide pandemic.

It’s now thought the flu epidemic started from a diseased pig farm near a U.S. Army training camp in Kansas. Sick soldiers and soon-to-be-sick soldiers traveled from Kansas to final visits to home cities and then East to be loaded onto ships to go to France. The flu spread like wildfire. European battle casualties became less of a problem than the thousands getting sick and dying from the flu.

Some historians say the flu so incapacitated both sides of the conflict that it became the main reason for the end of the war.

Flu deaths increased with the devastation of the 1918 fire. More than 450 people were claimed by the flames on Oct. 12, 1918, but another 100 to 200 more, weakened by the smoke and heat, died in the next few months from the flu.

Few families were spared. Two of my close family were lost at that time from the flu, as well as several extended family in Finland. Healthy young men from teenage years to 40 were especially hit hard by the disease. The flu killed five million people worldwide in 1918 and 1919.

With most of our neighborhoods burned out, families were forced into tents or boarded out to other places in the region.

Hundreds of people were sickened by the flu well into 1919.

The black smallpox epidemic of 1924 left another imprint. Smallpox could be prevented by a vaccine but not all got the immunization. Grandma Koivisto lost her brother August when he chose to not be immunized because “I am tough enough to not get the illness,” she would say. Scores of people died in Carlton County. Public events and school classes were canceled during this period of smallpox and flu to contain the spread.

Tuberculosis was a dreaded disease of the period. For a long time it was a death sentence for those infected, many in their teens and 20s. Pneumonia, easily treated now, killed many. Walking pneumonia was the diagnosis when you were sick and still moving around. Without rest and good care, that pneumonia could turn to the worse and kill. Quick pneumonia haunted parents — children would show symptoms, then be dead in a few hours.

The dreaded disease of my childhood was polio. Polio crippled the affected and if it settled in the chest, it meant death. Schools, swimming pools, and public places were closed often in the 1930s and 1940s if cases occurred. No one at the time knew how it spread. Cloquet’s Shirley Wirtanen remembers school being canceled for a time in Cloquet around 1938 or 1939, when two children in town were infected with polio. Only one survived.

Polio became quite personal for my family in the later 1950s. Many of us had been given the polio shot, thanks to the work of Jonas Salk, but some had not. My cousin, Rand, got polio and ended up at Sister Kenny Rehabilitation Institute in Minneapolis for care. He survived, but he was unable to walk. For a year or two, when we played outside, our group of kids carried him around like a big doll. He looked very skinny and it took a long time before he had a head of hair. We called him “Egghead.” We included him in all our activities and encouraged him to do what he could. I never thought of it as anything but total acceptance of him.

He eventually got better and one day went into the service. Today you would never know he had fought the disease.

In the early 1960s, those of us in school were amazed that, thanks to Albert Sabin, we could take sugar lumps with medication to be immune to polio. The dread of polio was history.

I truly never thought that in our world today, with lots of safeguards for our health, we would face a 1918-like pandemic again. My grandparents’ fearful but accepting words are now fresh in my mind: “What was old is now new again.”

Americans are a hardy bunch, and we will survive and learn from this current epidemic.

And, I hope, we will be better human beings in the end.

Dan Reed is a freelance writer for the Pine Knot News and local historian who lives in Automba Township, where both sides of his family settled 130 years ago.