Three hundred sailors from Boston landed at the Philadelphia Navy Yard on September 7; on the 19th the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that 600 sailors and marines had been hospitalized with the flu. It should have been apparent to city officials that a potential crisis loomed. In Massachusetts the flu had spread rapidly from military encampments to the public at large. Medical practitioners in Philadelphia called for a quarantine, but Wilmer Krusen, director of the city’s Department of Public Health and Charities, declined. There was recent precedent for such action: Quarantines were regularly enacted during a terrifying polio epidemic in 1916. But that was in peacetime. No civilian deaths from flu had been reported locally, and a Liberty Loan parade — perhaps the largest parade Philadelphia had ever seen — was scheduled for the end of the month. A quarantine would only cause panic, and the city would most certainly not meet its quota of war-bond sales.

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Every American seemingly had a personal stake in winning the war. Even children were eager to do their bit. Anna Milani, who was a child in Philadelphia during the epidemic, remembered the rhyme she and her friends would sing in the street:

Tramp, tramp, tramp the boys are marching
I spied Kaiser at the door
We’ll get a lemon pie
And we’ll squash it in his eye
And there won’t be any Kaiser anymore

The parade stepped off as planned on September 28 with marching bands, military units, women’s auxiliaries and Boy Scout troops. Some 200,000 spectators thronged the two-mile-long parade route in a show of civic pride. Three days later, 635 new civilian cases of flu, and 117 civilian deaths from the disease and its complications, were reported in Philadelphia.

Worry is Useless
October 1918 was brutal in the City of Brotherly Love. Schools, churches, theaters and saloons were closed. So many Bell Telephone operators were home sick that the company placed notices in city newspapers pleading with the public tocut out every call that is not absolutely necessary that the essential needs of the government, doctors and nurses may be met. Krusen authorized Bell to discontinue service to those making unnecessary calls, and 1,000 customers were eventually cut off.

Even if emergency calls did get through, there weren’t enough people to answer them. A quarter of Philadelphia’s doctors and nurses were away serving in the military. Volunteers were called, but many were too sick themselves — or too frightened of contracting the disease — to be of much help. Entire families were stricken, and the prognosis was often grim.My mother called the doctor because the whole family was sick with this flu, said Harriet Hasty Ferrell.And I, being an infant baby, was very sick, to the point that the doctor thought that I would not make it. He told my mother it wasn’t necessary to feed me anymore.

Still, there were those who tried to quell panic. An October 6 editorial in the Inquirer advised:Live a clean life. Do not even discuss influenza….Worry is useless. Talk of cheerful things instead of the disease.

No amount of happy talk could make the nightmare go away. Between October 12 and October 19, 4,597 Philadelphians died of the flu and related respiratory diseases, and survivors struggled to carry out familiar mourning rituals.We couldn’t go inside the church, one city native remembered.The priest would say Mass on the step, and we would all be congregated outside….They figured maybe outside you wouldn’t catch the germ. Another recalled that her 13-year-old cousin, who was sick with the flu, had to be carried to the cemetery wrapped in a blanket in order to say the traditional Jewish prayers at his mother’s funeral service. Hundreds of unburied corpses posed another serious health risk. Caskets were in such short supply that the J.G. Brill Co., which manufactured trolley cars, donated packing crates to fill the need. The Bureau of Highways used a steam shovel to dig mass graves in a potter’s field. By the end of the month, the Spanish flu had claimed 11,000 victims in Philadelphia and 195,000 nationwide.

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