The Great Influenza

My grandparents generation came of age during the Great War. In the true martial spirit of the family neither of my grandfathers served in the war. My Great Uncle Ralph served in the Navy and my Great Uncle Fred was one of the first marine pilots.

I'm listening to an audiobook on the great influenza epidemic of 1918 and I always believed that Uncle Ralph was one of those struck with the disease at its first outbreak at Commonwealth Pier Receiving Station since family legend noted "his entire military service was spent in the hospital." The audiobook peaked my interest in the family so I turned to Ancestry.com which has the draft cards from World War I on line. It is not one of their finest scanning jobs. The small type of the cards is usually illegible while the handwritten information is not much better. Thus, it's unclear why Grandpa Hands born in 1890 and Grandpa McKean born in 1894 were not called up. Both apparently were in the boot industry so maybe "war work" was the reason. Grandpa McKean served as an auxiliary policeman in Braintree during the war which is why Sacco and Vanzetti waited until the postwar era to pull off their famous heist (assuming they did it).

I believe I may have mentioned Uncle Fred in an earlier blog. I'll have to check that because he deserves an essay of his own. Family legend had him in France at the Armistice pulling off a dangerous stunt. The stunt presumably happened earlier; he was grounded for disciplinary reasons when he was struck with the flu and ended the war in a hospital in England. The only member of the family with a documented tie to the greatest epidemic in human history.

That leaves Uncle Ralph who is buried near my Grandfather McKean in Braintree. I didn't know Uncle Ralph very well. He was a school teacher who married my grandfather's sister. She, by the time I knew her smelled like cats and had the annoying habit of always topping someone's stories. "Wow, it was 15 below zero this morning." "Well, here in Waltham, it was 17 below!" Their only child moved away, and when Ralph and Ella died my side of the family got the job of decorating their graves on Memorial Day. Ralph's draft card was the clearest of the three and gave me a real surprise. He had indeed served in the Navy. It looks like that his service may have started in 1917, but he was discharged in July, 1918 not for influenza which wouldn't strike for another month, but for heart disease. Ralph was 21 and whatever the heart disease was (rheumatic fever perhaps?), he managed to live another 52 years.

My grandfather on the McKean side of the family had another brother-in-law, Uncle Harold who along with Uncle Fred was a favorite of that generation He was a clerk at the oil depot in Quincy so he too may have been involved in war work. My grandfather Hands died when I was five so I never knew the uncles in that generation on that side of the family. Time to find out about those mystery men.