Baseball and Pandemics

There's no baseball right now unless you count the Korean games which are interesting, but I can't pronounce the players' names except for the few Americans who are playing. But the games come on ESPN because there is nothing else that is live except them, so we cheer for the Samsung Tigers or whatever team is leading. In 1918 the Spanish flu swept the world, and more than 675,000 Americans died because of it with no vaccine. Baseball had started in March and kept on with everyone wearing masks: players, coaches, umpires, fans. Yes, they tried to stop it just as we are in 2020. The season got shortened, but there was a World Series. and just at that time a second wave hit the U. S., and even more people died. Football was only in October and November although some college teams didn't play at all. No high school games were played. It would last for 18 months and made funerals a common occurrence. 

So we can't say that we are going through anything more than they did. In my family Mother sometimes talked about the terrible flu because she and her five brothers and mother came down with it at the same time when they lived in some little Oklahoma town. Granpa Ramsey was off somewhere chasing a rainbow (he did that often), so they had to fend for themselves with no teleconference with a doctor or nearby drugstore for a prescription that might be delivered. Help they received was from my great-grandmother Ramsey who trudged over every day from her house to their front porch with a pot of soup. She would take the previous pot that had been set outside and go home to scald it and replenish it. Mother or Grandma Ida or one of my uncles would struggle to the porch to bring in the soup so everyone could have something to eat. That went on for almost 2 weeks until the family began to recover from the fevers and chills and coughs. I sometimes think of my great-grandmother doing this every day with no thought of how tired she was or how frightened she might be that somehow she could come down with the flu. She just did what she had to do. I love her.

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