The year was 1918, and American troops fought to bring Imperial Germany to its knees and end World War I, even as another deadly enemy spread across America.
An influenza outbreak, that had its origins in Spain, became an epidemic that started killing people in Lynn and other parts of the country by late summer that year.
In a retrospective 50 years later on the epidemic, noted Daily Evening Item writer Jim Tagalakis recounted how the city’s health commissioner as late as Sept. 17 said flu or “grip” reports “did not constitute any cause for alarm.”
A communications network still firmly anchored in the 19th century prevented Michael R. Donovan from knowing that even as he downplayed the flu danger in Lynn, hundreds of city residents and others in communities across the northeastern United States were experiencing early onset flu symptoms.
A day later, according to Tagalakis’ account, first reports of flu deaths started to be recorded by health authorities. Five deaths reported on Sept. 18 spiked to 11 on Sept. 23. On the 24th, headlines that would shock even by today’s media standards blared the frightening news: Ten deaths in the past 24 hours. Red Cross makes an appeal for cots and bedding and topping the news — the city’s decision to “seize” a mansion atop the Highlands and use it as an emergency hospital.
Located on the Knowledge Is Power Program charter school’s current site, the A.B. Martin estate had previously been offered to the Red Cross by sisters Alice and May Martin. It quickly got converted to a hospital. Also on the 24th, Donovan delivered the startling news to city officials that an estimated 10,000 city residents might have been exposed to the flu.
He issued a general alert to residents advising that “… any signs of cold in the head or complaining of headache or chilliness …” should confine people to their homes and send children to bed.
Between Sept. 24 and 25, 18 more local flu deaths were reported and 2,000 students were reported absent from local schools with the flu. In an age of rudimentary telephone connections, communication was quickly comprised by the epidemic with 15 telephone exchange operators calling in sick.
Although the Martin mansion could be outfitted with 70 beds, school officials moved to designate the former Bacheller School on Lynnfield Street as a backup emergency hospital.
By Sept. 26, Lynn and cities across the northeast were slowly shutting down with schools and theaters closed and ministers met to consider shuttering churches until the epidemic subsided.
The flu reached into local hospitals and killed the people working to keep others alive.
“Miss Mary A. Spears … is the second nurse at (Lynn Hospital) to die of the disease since the epidemic started. Miss Spears gave her life to serve others, for she gave tender care to many afflicted ones before she was taken down as a victim of the epidemic,” mourned an Item story.
September ended with 21 more deaths and October began with the River Works reporting 2,260 employees out of work, nearly all of them with the flu. The 14,000-employee workforce typically recorded 300 people out sick on a day in 1918.
The city established a bureau for logging flu case reports and a Mutual Benefit Association coordinated multiple efforts to wage war against the epidemic.
Mayor Walter Creamer on Oct. 3 announced schools and public gathering places would stay closed through Oct. 14. Fifteen more Lynn residents died from the flu on Oct. 7. Over the next three days, the death toll increased by 40 people.
But by the middle of October, precautions ranging from quickly identifying flu sufferers and confining them to bed and precautions against gatherings and assemblies started to reverse the flu’s deadly course in the city and across the country.
Tagalakis chronicled local school and theater reopenings on Oct. 20. “Lynners were once more able to walk the streets and gather together without the fear of death stalking over them,” he wrote.
But the flu still cut a deadly swath globally, killing an estimated 20 million people by mid-1919, including a half million Americans. In Lynn, the death toll totaled 300 in an age when vaccines and store shelves lined with flu remedies were nonexistent.
Don’t forget to get that flu shot.
