re: #16 Joe Bacon 🌹

Grandma Bacon told me about the 1918 epidemic in DC when corpses were stacked in public buildings. Funeral homes were working 24 hours to bury corpses and then they were ordered to cremate remains. Grandma said if you didn’t live through it you wouldn’t comprehend how scary it was. She had gotten the flu the previous year and she thought that’s why she didn’t get sick in 1918. But she saw coworkers come into the Navy department, start coughing around 10 AM and by 1 PM they collapsed and were pronounced dead within an hour…

Mr grandfather died in the Spanish Flu Pandemic. He was 29 years old, leaving behind a pregnant widow (my grandmother, who gave birth to my father 2 months later).