Wringer Washer Machine                                            (www.automaticwasher.org)

While I grew up my grandmother Hannah Baker Tarrant took care of me. She lived in Trumbull Gardens, a housing project on the Southeast side of Chicago. I spent my first five years there with her (during the late ’60s and early ’70s.) On certain designated days, she would do her laundry in the basement of the apartment complex that she lived in. On her designated day she was able to use a fenced lawn in the projects to hang out her clothes. If the weather was too bad she could use a sectioned off room in the basement which had clothing lines.

She would tell me how much she liked her wringer washer machine. She thought of it as such a luxury. I was always fascinated by it. After the clothes went through a spin cycle she would have to grab each piece and put it through the “wringer”, which would squeeze out all the water. Then she would drain the soapy water from the basin of the machine and let it fill up with clean water. This was the rinse cycle. We would repeat the wringing one more time. She never let me wring them; she said my fingers would get smashed.

During these times she would tell me all about Ireland. She grew up in Dingle until she came to the United States as a young 18-year-old girl. In Ireland, they did not have things like the wringer machine. She told me about how hard things were then. Maybe because I myself was very little, it never occurred to me that anything she said could be possible. Her stories were just that, a story. Like a fairytale. One story that just recently came to mind and literally woke me from my sleep was the story about how her siblings started dying, one by one.

My grandma told about a time when she was my age that she would go to bed at night and wake up the next morning to find one of her brothers dead, sleeping next to her. I could not wrap my head around this then, but I had to look into it now as we are sheltered in place during the Coronavirus pandemic. After verifying with my Aunt Mag that this was a true memory (my grandmother passed away in 1998), I decided to look into my grandmother’s story a little deeper.

Around 1916 in Ireland, most families lost children to infectious diseases such as whooping cough, scarlet fever, Diptheria, and the disease which took my grandmother’s siblings, tuberculosis (TB.)

One-eighth of the population in Ireland died from TB, which at that time was 6,471. Another 6,708 died from pneumonia and bronchitis. TB, like many other viruses, was transmitted by respiratory droplets. I learned that men were more at risk of contracting and dying from TB than women, which explained why my grandmother lost all of her brothers.

My grandmother told me that when a sibling would pass away, her mother would cry a distinctive cry. One day when my grandmother was walking home from school, she could hear her mother cry. She said to me, “I recognize that cry and ran off. I knew another one had died.”

I think her story runs so powerfully in my mind now, while I am working from home during this pandemic of Coronavirus. I think of what my Great-grandmother went through back in Ireland in the early 1900s, burying child after child. I think of how my grandmother felt, wondering each night who would be next.

With each pandemic, it seems the world has learned valuable lessons. Prior to the TB episode was the Diptheria pandemic. Diptheria comes from the Greek word for “leather” which described the way the throat looked inside when a person had it. It was during this pandemic that a doctor performed the first tracheotomy. This involved cutting open the trachea and inserting a tube the opening to allow air and cleaning out of the lungs. This is what we now call “intubation”, and is done when a patient is put on a ventilator.

An antitoxin was developed for Diptheria and was able to save many children. An Alaskan doctor, during the height of Diptheria, had ordered the medicine for his town of Nome, Alaska in 1924. A hospital in Anchorage had 300,000 units of it but could only deliver it to a city that was 674 miles away from Nome. Twenty mushers with dogs and sleds braved sub-zero weather, with several dying or getting frostbit to make the rest of the journey. The physician was able to save the children in his town. This journey was called the Great Race of Mercy.

The Great Race of Mercy antitoxin delivery for Diptheria (1924)

Before Diptheria, there were other pandemics in history that I barely remember learning much about. The “black death” was also known as the bubonic plague. During 1347 and 1350, this disease killed 30% of all of Europe.

The 1918 flu was one of the worst diseases in history, accounting for more than one-third of the world’s population in loss of life (approximately 50,000 million people at that time.) Through this outbreak, the importance of sheltering in place became a concept. Cities who strictly adhered to social distancing saw far less mortality. The city of Philadelphia disregarded the warning to shelter in place and threw a parade to celebrate the World War I effort, with over 200,000 people attending the parade. By the end of the week, over 4,500 people died from the flu. The neighboring city of St. Louis, which did not participate and instead shut down its public transit and city, suffered half of the loss of Philadelphia. Children would wear little satchel bags of camphor around their necks to prevent the spread of the disease. For them, camphor was the 1900s version of hand sanitizer.

During the Spanish Flu of 1918-19, children wore small satchels around their necks filled with camphor.

Novel coronaviruses such as SARS, Ebola, and Zika have a high mutation rate. A new study suggests that for every confirmed case of coronavirus, there are likely 5-10 more people who also have it undetected. Just this week our U.S. Government experts have warned that perhaps 100,000 people could perish from the coronavirus disease. The importance of social distancing, a method that was emphasized during the Spanish flu in the early 1900s, stands true today. We are converting McCormick Place into a makeshift hospital, similar to the time of the Spanish flu when schools and other buildings became makeshift hospitals, and medical students had to take the place of doctors.

It is believed that the bats are to blame for the spread of the Coronavirus. The Cholera pandemic of the 1800s is believed to have been spread by a contaminated water pump handle which now sits in a museum in London. The flu pandemics are believed to have originated from avian flu that came from Hong Kong and China.

Social distancing, cleanliness such as washing your hands, and sheltering in place are critical during this time as it was during the time of other pandemic diseases in history. Unlike my grandmother and great-grandmother from Ireland, we have so much more on our side through social media, our news and information that we can access at any given time, our incredible medical facilities and doctors, nurses, first responders, and labs. I would never have guessed that I would ever witness a pandemic in my lifetime. My family is safe, unlike my great-grandmother’s experience of burying more than half of her children. We may have moved so much further from the days of the wringer washer machine. Yet we have to learn to respect the lessons from those days and the stories shared with us by our ancestors. We must pay great tribute to their hard-fought battles during times of disease and pandemics, lest we blindly suffer such tragedy again.

My grandmother Hannah Baker-Tarrant (right) with her sister Kathleen (1926) Chicago, IL