Watch my Festival of Books in the Alleghenies presentation
The COVID craziness has led to a cancellation of just about every event I had scheduled this year. One of those events, the Festival of Books in the Alleghenies, decided to go digital and offered authors the chance to do a digital presentation to viewers. I was lucky enough to be selected, and my interview was last night on Zoom and Facebook Live. The topic was the Spanish Flu, which I wrote about in my novel October Mourning. I must of done something right because I was told it was their most-viewed presentation, so far (and before you ask, no, I wasn’t the first presentation). Here’s the link to the presentation. I begins around the 2 minute mark. As always, let me know what you think.
The Spanish Flu hits Adams County (Part 1)
In 1918, the world was at war. Though it was a different war and a different century, Gettysburg found itself once again occupied by an army. Young men were sent there to learn to fight the Germans in World War I. They trained to fight the enemy using a piece of state-of-the-art military technology called the tank. The problem was that no one could see their enemy that they were fighting in Gettysburg. It moved indiscriminately through camps and communities injuring and killing men, women, soldier, children. It made no difference. This war waged for about a year until the enemy retreated and hid but not before killing, by the worst estimate, about 50 million people or more than 4 times the population of Pennsylvania died. It was not World War I that killed all those people. It was the Read more…
The sneeze that killed
Elmer Martin, who lived near Crellin, returned to work on October 15, 1918, after being sick for a few days. The 28-year-old felt fine and needed to get back to earning a living at the Turner-Douglas Mine as a driver. He seemed fine his first day back, but when he didn’t report to work the next day, someone realized that he had never made it home. A search began and lasted all night until Martin’s body was discovered alongside the tracks of the Preston Railroad. He had apparently just fallen down and died. He wasn’t the only one, either. Across Garrett County, more than 100 people died from Spanish Flu in fall of 1918. The flu wasn’t just a problem in the county, either. Spanish Flu reached nearly every place on the globe and by the time it subsided at Read more…
Don’t let the flu get you!
So it seems like everyone lately has the flu. Schools are sending warnings home to parents. Hospitals are telling patients with the flu not to come in. The Centers for Disease Control has said that is has hit epidemic level. So how bad can it get? The worst to date has been the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918. It left about 50 million dead after just a couple months. I wrote about it in my novel October Mourning. I’ve also written about half a dozen articles about it and given a couple talks about it.I continue to be fascinated (scared?) by it. It killed more people than World War I and in a shorter time frame, too, yet the war had the headlines during 1918. It was estimated that 675,000 Americans died from the Spanish Flu or 10 times more Read more…
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