Modern, past pandemics cross paths; we’ve seen this movie before – Sharonherald

THE MOMENT on a recent sunny Saturday afternoon was coincidental, ironic and surreal.

In St. Anns Cemetery, on the Farrell-Hermitage border, I spotted the date 1918 on a monument a row or two away. Then I realized that the only other two people in the cemetery besides my girlfriend and I were visiting the same grave, the resting place of an influenza victim.

I carried their family name scribbled on a scrap of paper in my pocket.

They wore masks.

As the couple walked toward their car, I shouted to them to explain my mission. I reached for my wallet to give them one of my business cards. The octogenarian gentleman, Ray Manofsky, instinctively took a step or two toward me to exchange one of his. His wife, Diane, protectively barked, six feet. six feet as if a golden retriever had strayed too close to others walking on the beach.

We were strangers interested in the same person who died a century ago and protecting each other from a modern pandemic that threatened to put our names on a block of granite if we got too social without a distance.

Wandering through cemeteries is nothing new to me. Ive done it for years, and Ive even organized tours of Oakwood Cemetery in Hermitage.

Lately, Ive had a different purpose for spending hours strolling the emerald turf: Hunting for the physical remembrances of the people Ive come to know through death certificates and newspaper stories. The numerals 1918 jump out at me now. They were there all along; now they take on special meaning.

SHARON The large drill hall in Buhl Armory on Sharpsville Avenue in Sharon normally was fi

No one deserves to be forgotten. No one deserves to fade away, implores lyrics from the Br

Ive been poring through bound volumes of The Sharon Herald from the autumn of that fateful year. The fragile, crumbling pages dropped flakes of yellow snow on my carpet as I turned each tender page to follow the flu pandemic as it unfolded day by day.

The parallels to modern times were everywhere:

State and local officials ordered schools, churches, theaters, bars, liquor stores and other places of amusement to close, for weeks.

The Mercer County court system shut down, for the first time.

Hospitals were overwhelmed. An emergency hospital opened. Caregivers and medical personnel themselves fell ill.

Businesses were itching to return to normal hours and operation. In some cases, restrictions had previously been imposed to conserve energy in the waning days of The Great War.

Whenever local or state officials eased up and allowed mass gatherings rallies to sell war bonds or to celebrate the end of World War I, or reopening schools the plague often flared up again.

Besides reading newspapers accounts, Ive been trolling Ancestry.com, which holds images of official Pennsylvania death certificates. Local authorities tended to file certificates in batches of a few weeks at a time. You cant easily search by town, but if you know one name theres usually a vein of adjacent filings from the same community.

Through this mining, I found more than 700 Mercer County death certificates from October, November and December 1918. Of those deaths, about 500 were from some combination of influenza and pneumonia.

Dont say historydidnt warn us.

Those who didnt die of the flu succumbed to the usual suspects of the day, most of them scourges long since eradicated by modern medicine and hygiene (yeah, science!).

Like the title of Seth MacFarlanes 2014 western comedy, there were A Million Ways to Die in the West. Same here in the East.

If the flu didnt get ya, it might have been a bout of tetanus, typhoid fever, scarlet fever, diphtheria, tuberculosis, dysentery, meningitis, diabetes, ptomaine poisoning (contributory cause: pork), gangrene, malnutrition, cirrhosis of the liver, senility, cancer of something, coronary ailments, apoplexy (a catch-all for stroke and similar ailments), sepsis after an injury or surgery, crushed by a train, a fatal industrial accident, or the occasional, ghastly burning to death in a house fire.

Or, as the attending physician wrote for the cause of death for a 5-day-old who died in Pymatuning Township on Dec. 22: I do not know.

But mostly, it was the great influenza.

On Oct. 2, just as the flu was beginning to spread, a 17-year-old boy died in Sharpsville during a huge Liberty Bond sales parade. While jumping on a vehicle decorated as a Liberty Tank, the tank was struck by a streetcar, knocking the boy off and crushing his head.

That oddity aside, parades here and especially one in Philadelphia were the big killers too much socializing and not enough distancing. Reading about them, its a horror movie whose plot you can guess. Dont do it!

Theres no telling how many of the influenza victims would have died anyway of some other cause that million-ways thing. But in todays world, so many of those other causes are diseases that have been eradicated or conditions like heart disease and cancer that are treatable or preventable.

There were 199,787 deaths recorded in Pennsylvania in 1918. That number was 137,860 the year before in 1917 and fell to 118,000 in 1919. The flu pandemic was more than a blip.

Influenza often took down multiple people in a single family, just days apart, like a barn cat finding and wiping out a nest of newborn bunnies. Frequently, it truncated families with a premature birth, a stillborn child or a baby dying within hours or days after birth and then the mother dying, too.

Often the same spouse or parent is listed as the informant who provided information for multiple death certificates just days apart. They probably were the ones who made funeral arrangements, perhaps while they themselves were ill. The shock and grief seem unimaginable.

Wandering through local cemeteries on that recent afternoon, I came upon a monument with the sweet smile of a 20-month-old child gazing at me from a porcelain oval above his name. Adam Vrtagic Jr. died in 1952 of Americas mid-century pandemic, polio.

Weve seen this movie before. Dont say history didnt warn us.

The president has said on several occasions, with incredulity, that America has never seen anything like this before a pandemic that shuts the country down, emergency ramping up of industrial production, unemployment of as much as a quarter of the workforce.

Yes we have: The 1918 flu pandemic (which Trump infuriatingly keeps saying was in 1917); the sacrifices and wartime production during World Wars I and II; and the Great Depression.

What does history teach us? What will we learn from todays experiences?

Weve been through it before, and it was every bit as challenging.

But we persevered, we endured, we conquered the enemy. We got through it.

Well get through this one, too. Its what we do as a people.

Stay safe, stay well.

JOHN ZAVINSKI is The Heralds assistant editor for graphics. He also is the vice president and a founding member of the Sharon Historical Society and co-leads the societys history walks of downtown Sharon. Email him at jzavinski@sharonherald.com

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Modern, past pandemics cross paths; we've seen this movie before - Sharonherald

Reviewed and Recommended by Erik Baquero