Latest in a series of posts on the Spanish Flu

For perspective on our current coronavirus situation, we are following the entrance of the 1918 Spanish Influenza, that paragon of pandemics, into the minds and bodies of Lehigh Valley residents who got their news through the Morning Call (the files of the Bethlehem Globe are closed to us at the moment).

“Never let a good crisis go to waste,” famously said Rahm Emanuel, President Obama’s chief of staff during the 2008 economic crisis.

A lesson never lost on real estate salesmen.

October 1918 — The Spanish Flu was ramping up to feast on Allentown and Bethlehem.

The perfect time to pitch escape from the “crowded city” festering with disease — escape to the “sunshine and open space” at “beautiful Highland Park”!

Safe country livin’ on easy terms.

Look at this deliciously sly pitch. An ad masked as a public service announcement.

Readers are lured in by a short litany of advice about how to avoid the dreaded disease only to find themselves tempted to change their addresses.

You gotta love the enterprise of the Lehigh Real Estate Company!

Now Bethlehem historians need to weigh in. Could this be the present Bethlehem Township “Highland Park” in the area of the Community Center on Farmersville Rd.? Doesn’t seem to be if it’s only an 8 minute trolley ride to 8th and Hamilton. Any ideas?

Latest in a series of posts on the Spanish Flu

For perspective on our current coronavirus situation, we are following the entrance of the 1918 Spanish Influenza, that paragon of pandemics, into the minds and bodies of Lehigh Valley residents who got their news through the Morning Call (the files of the Bethlehem Globe are closed to us at the moment).

The directive from the state to shut down certain businesses because of the Spanish Flu came on a Thursday night.

As you can sense from the Mayor’s reaction to the idea of a quarantine in our last post, Allentown did not go gentle into that good night.

The above article in the Monday October 7 Morning Call reported that A-town “was the only municipality in this part of the state that did not immediately comply with the order.”

But it also reported that the order would be “rigidly enforced” beginning that Monday morning after saloons remained open Saturday night and a few movie houses that didn’t close did a “tremendous business.”

The paper reported that Bethlehem, however, was “closed up tight,” though the order to close was “taken with poor grace in many quarters.”

Remarks “from the pulpit,” for instance, indicated “the feeling there is against the ruling.”

Certain businesses in Bethlehem were closed immediately Friday morning, but the ice cream and liquor dealers invented the practice of take-out to temporarily skirt the order.

To avoid the loss of thousands of gallons of ice cream, the dealers were permitted to sell to the “family trade only” on a take-out basis.  And the liquor dealers did a “big business” selling “their goods by the quarts thru the windows” on Saturday, “the biggest day they have had in many moons.”

The Bethlehem police had orders to enforce the shut-down, “raiding” Southside Coffee Houses at 429 and 523 E. Third St. on Sunday, arresting a total of 37 men. The paper (oddly?) specifically reported that both Coffee Houses were run by Greeks, one of whom “got away.”

Raiding “Coffee Houses”? Is that code for something else?

And singling out Greeks? What’s up with that?

And who do we find among the raiding officers but an “E. Gallagher”!

Gadfly meets his doppelganger.

Wasn’t ready for that.

Latest in a series of posts on the Spanish Flu

For perspective on our current coronavirus situation, we are following the entrance of the 1918 Spanish Influenza, that paragon of pandemics, into the minds and bodies of Lehigh Valley residents who got their news through the Morning Call (the files of the Bethlehem Globe are closed to us at the moment).

So we are going almost day-by-day from the arrival of the Spanish Flu in the U.S. on September 13, 1918, marking local awareness of and local events related to the Flu as seen by a reader of the Morning Call.***

On October 5 the Call reported that, pursuant to an order by state health authorities, the Allentown City Council — acting as a Board of Health — voted to close “all public places of amusement and saloons” in tandem with Bethlehem and Easton.

A vote much to the chagrin of the Allentown Mayor, who was “strong in his denunciation of the order, calling it the work of the Bethlehem Steel Company officials” — apparently referring to the Steel’s desire to insure a proper and steady work force for its war effort responsibilities.

In his denunciation of the action, the Mayor stated “that Bethlehem was filthy and dirty, and that a wagon load of refuse could be secured from three blocks of the highways and that the streets were covered with thick layers of dust, the worst breeder of disease.”

One wishes we had access to the Bethlehem papers for rebuttals to that one!

It’s also curious that the A-town mayor focuses on city dirt as the breeder of the disease (and apparently implying that Allentown streets are not in such condition). He is closer here in his denunciation of the quality of public transportation to the common wisdom about conditions favoring the disease:

Basically, however, it appears that the A-town mayor was a kind of pandemic denier, attributing this “so-called influenza” to nothing more than a widespread bout of the common cold caused by people not heating their homes properly.

What!? Just the day before the Call had reported 14,000 new (!) cases in army camps!

The shut-down order, concluded the Mayor in the classic style of exaggerated political oratory, is “Prussianism, and just what we are fighting for ‘over there’ now and was the work of autocrats and not in reason.”

O, my.

But Bethlehem was not without its craziness as the shut-down tightened.

Next.

*** The Call newspaper article indicated that there were five daily newspapers in Allentown at the time. What riches! Who knew?

Latest in a series of posts on the Spanish Flu

For perspective on our current coronavirus situation, we are following the entrance of the 1918 Spanish Influenza, that paragon of pandemics, into the minds and bodies of Lehigh Valley residents who got their news through the Morning Call (the files of the Bethlehem Globe are closed to us at the moment).

Our president has called himself, metaphorically, a war-president in the fight against the coronavirus.

In 1918, there was a real war going on when the Spanish Flu arrived.

A war in which Bethlehem Steel, Bethlehem Steel workers, and Bethlehem in general played an essential role.

Gadfly bets you hadn’t considered how fighting a foe in Europe complicates fighting a flu in the ether.

But doesn’t the following situation sound familiar?

Recognition that “social distancing” combats the disease (plus recognition that we’re a crucial link in the military supply chain) but reluctance to “go the distance” because of entertainment and business interests.

Another disease sometimes seems to come in tandem with the pandemics: political paralysis.

The government official recommends the Lehigh Valley tri-cities enter in to an “absolute quarantine . . . in order to guard against the danger of a Spanish influenza epidemic which the government fears would cripple the industrial centres hereabouts that are turning out war products.”

The government official recommends “the prohibition of all public gatherings in the city, the closing of all schools, theatres, saloons, pool rooms, soda fountains and churches for an indefinite period.”

Shut-down. Shelter-in-place.

The Allentown mayor drags feet. Such “drastic and radical” action will interfere with fund raising for the war (red herring), there’s already the constructive effort of an anti-flu placard, sign, and card campaign (we’re doing enough to fight the disease now), and he opts to wait to see what others will do (punts).

The government official sees the real reason: “When General Pershing cables for guns and ammunition we cannot tell him that we cannot send the supplies because we didn’t quarantine a city for fear it would be an inconvenience to the merchants and saloonmen.”

The government official turns the screws, or tries to: “If production at the Bethlehem Steel plant is impeded because of the epidemic, we will be culpable. . . . This is a radical act but these are radical times.”

Decision, decisions — that’s why our local officials make the big money! (Just kidding, of course.)

God grant our elected officials the courage to act with wisdom and speed in radical times.

(Wouldn’t you love to see “man-in-the-street” interviews?)

Morning Call, October 2, 1918

Latest in a series of posts on the Spanish Flu

For perspective on our current coroniavirus situation, we are following the entrance of the 1918 Spanish Influenza, that paragon of pandemics, into the minds and bodies of Lehigh Valley residents who got their news through the Morning Call (the files of the Bethlehem Globe are closed to us at the moment).

In the period a few days before and after October 1, 1918, Bethlehem readers of the Morning Call could see the disease coming closer and closer to their homes.

On September 27 Allentonian James Kingston returned from Tennessee and the funeral of his nephew, “a specimen of good health, 27 years of age,” whose “sudden and unexpected death” while serving in the army at Camp Devens was a “severe shock” to the family.

But that was nobody’s immediate family and Camp Devens and Tennessee were far away.

On October 1 in Easton, “suspicion was aroused” that two people with no connection with the military died of the “dreaded Spanish Influenza,” 20-year-old Ulmont White and 55-year-old Seth Johnson.

But that was Easton and the cause of death unsure.

October 2 was the day uncertainty itself died in Allentown. On October 2 the Spanish Flu claimed John Levi Keiser, age 68, 118 Walnut St.; Harvey Diehl, age 29, 19 S. 12th St.; and Lewis Uhl, 320 N. 6th.

On September 13, the Spanish Flu arrived in the U.S.; on October 2 it arrived in Allentown.

The Flu was no longer a number; it had a name, an address, and a story.

It was real.

Keiser was the Lehigh Valley Railroad gatetender at the 3rd St. crossing, someone many people might have passed over the years. Diehl had the hard luck of catching the Flu literally waiting in line for his discharge from the very army on which the Flu was feasting like a bear at a honey pot.

By October 4 the disease was certainly in Bethlehem, killing “a popular young resident,” 32-year-old Frank Lowery of 620 W. Broad St. (the address of the hairdresser next to the former Mayflower lunch across from Sim’s Market), a husband leaving a wife and two sons, a son himself tragically dying before his parents — perhaps the first Bethlehem resident known to succumb to the Flu.

The Spanish Flu had come to Bethlehem.