FLU EPIDEMIC 75 YEARS AGO TOOK SCORES OF LIVES IN AREA

City officials banned Christmas activities in Cape Girardeau 75 years ago ... as were Halloween parties earlier in the fall of 1918.

Schools and churches were closed and public gatherings were prohibited in hopes of stemming the spread of the Spanish influenza.

The influenza epidemic of 1918 circled the world and left in its wake 15-20 million dead, including 548,000 Americans and hundreds in Southeast Missouri.

"It was a bad thing," said Violet Lomax, 91, of Sikeston who remembers the devastation first hand. In fact, she counts herself lucky that the influenza killed just one member of her family.

"A lot of families had at least one or two who died," she said. "I had a sister-in-law who died. It didn't get in our family except for her."

For some families, the toll was much higher. On Jan. 7, 1919, the Southeast Missourian newspaper reported that Nora Heiser died. Her stepfather, John Henry Masters, had died a few days earlier. She was the fifth member of the family to die in three weeks from Spanish influenza.

On Jan. 10, 1919, the newspaper reported ten members of the families of J.M. Allison and Herman Bremermann were ill with influenza.

Lomax lived at Kewanee at the time of the Spanish influenza epidemic.

"I lived on the farm there and there was a graveyard not very far away. It seemed like all the time wagons were pulling up and families were burying someone else.

"So many people died," she said. "It seemed that just about everybody who had it didn't get over it."

The illness struck fast. She recalled a family where the woman died on Sunday and her husband on Tuesday.

The Spanish influenza has become part of the family history of Wendell Wyatt, who lives in Cape Girardeau. His grandfather, an Arkansas farmer, died during the epidemic.

"My father was one of five children, ages four to 16. I understand they were all sick in November at the time their father became ill," Wyatt said. "He was a farmer and was trying to gather the last of his corn. The weather was like we've been having this week -- damp and cold. He came in one afternoon with a temperature, went to bed and never got up.

"The old country doctor who would come to the house at that time, came to our house when I was a child," Wyatt recalled. "He would say to my father, `I could have saved your father if I had the medicines I have now.' He was talking about penicillin.

"Now the influenza is just part of our family history," he said.

Cape Girardeau County recorded 127 deaths from the influenza. The highest death count in the area was in Pemiscot County with 185.

Other area county death rates were Bollinger, 28; Madison, 48; Mississippi, 121; New Madrid, 113; Perry, 47; Reynolds, 12; St. Francois, 177; Ste. Genevieve, 35; Scott, 142; Stoddard, 153; and Wayne, 74.

During 1918 and into 1919, the Southeast Missourian newspaper pages were filled with reports on the influenza.

On Oct. 11, 1918, Cape Girardeau's City Council adopted a measure to prevent the spread of Spanish influenza, closing theaters, churches and schools, and prohibiting social functions and public weddings. Pool rooms were required to close at 8 p.m., and saloons were required to prevent assemblage of patrons by denying them the right to loiter after needs have been supplied.

This marked the first time possibly since the cholera epidemic of the 1850s that churches and Sunday schools were forced to close.

On Dec. 9, 1918, the newspaper reported more than 300 cases of influenza had developed in the past five days.

Hazel Painton, first victim of the Spanish influenza, died at her home on North Middle Street Oct. 10, 1918.

By Nov. 16, 1918, 19 people from Allenville had died of influenza, representing 10 percent of the town's population

The city ban on schools, picture shows and the library was lifted for a time in November. But the influenza worsened and the restrictions were imposed again.

As the year 1919 progressed, news of the epidemic dwindled along with the number of cases reported.

A story in the 1993 Farmer's Almanac about the Spanish influenza epidemic says the likelihood of a repeat performance in 1993 is unlikely, given modern medicine and communication systems.

But Dr. Louisa Chapman, a medical epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta is quoted: "People just don't take flu seriously. It's hard to convince them that it could be a real hazard."