McDonald Commentary: Spanish Influenza in 1920 Took Family of Six Down to Two

Between 1918 and 1920, Spanish influenza killed as many as 50 million people worldwide, nearly wiping out remote villages in Alaska, Iceland and New Zealand. During one week in 1918, the virus killed 72 of the 80 villagers at Teller Mission on Alaska’s Seward Peninsula, according David Getz, author of “Purple Death: The Mysterious Flu of 1918.”

But numbers never tell a story as well as the people who lived through it.

One of my earliest personal history narrators, Florence Damon Nagel, shared her experiences in “Life Is What You Make of It,” published in 2003. Her daughter, Marlene Nagel Hansen, who hired me, gave permission to share the following story from her mother’s book. Florence, a bookkeeper who lived her entire life in the Vancouver area, died Jan. 9, 2006, at the age of 94.

Her childhood friend, Millie Brampton, died at 5.

“During the World War, about 1917 or ’18, the flu epidemic happened, and some way or other, Dad heard that a family by the name of Brampton was sick with the flu. ... The Bramptons had four kids, just about the same age as the Damon four kids. We played a lot with each other and had good times. They had kind of a little store that they ran and had a few groceries there and so my folks traded with them as much as they could.

“My dad heard that they were sick with the flu, so he said to my mother, ‘I’m going to go down and visit the Bramptons and see how they are.’

“Mother said, ‘Well, you think it’s OK?’

“‘Oh, yes,’ he says, ‘I’m not going to stay.’

“So he left and went down. And he was back in an hour.

“‘Ruby,’ he says, ‘I’ve got to go down there and stay and you have to do some cooking. They’re sick down there.’

“And she said, ‘Milo, you can’t go down,’ she says. ‘You’ll bring it back to us. And we’ll all have it.’ She says, ‘Are all of them sick?’

“‘All of them,’ he says. ‘They can’t take care of anybody down there, they’re so sick. They have to have someone, Ruby. I can’t leave them by themselves.’

“And she says, ‘Milo, you can’t do it.’

“‘I have to, Ruby,’ he says. ‘You make a big bowl of vegetable soup.’ He says, ‘They’ve got to have something to eat, Ruby.’ And he says, ‘I’ll go out and dig some right now.’ So he went out and dug carrots and whatnot.

“So Mother made a big bowl of soup, and grumbled all the while she was making it. ...

“You set the soup out on the ground,’ he says, ‘when I call you and tell you I’m coming, I’m to walk up. I don’t want to come in the house.’ And he says, ‘Put a couple of extra pairs of pants in for me.’

 “Well, they were sick. The first one to die was the father, Mr. Brampton. Freddie was my brother Ralph’s age … and Freddie just cried and cried: ‘I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die.’ Arthur would have been the age of my brother Howard, and he died.

“Only their mother, Lucy (Dix) Brampton, and one daughter, 12-year-old Gertrude, survived. In a family of six, four people died in that household.

“I was born in 1911. I wasn’t old enough to quite understand death. Mother told me a little, you know, but — I had seen chickens die and pets die, but this was a person; that’s entirely different. I wasn’t satisfied. I was very curious about it all.

She told me when the hearse would go by our house, and she said, ‘There may have to be two of them.’

“Well, the day they were to be buried, I stayed on the porch. I wanted to see what … happened. Cars in that time were really something, you know. I didn’t see that many cars. So, I stayed outside and pretty soon came a big white hearse, followed by the second white hearse, followed by the third white hearse, and along came the last hearse — a little bit smaller, and that was the one that my Mildred was in. ...

“But my father, he just had to stay … with that family. My mother, every time, she’d say, ‘Milo, don’t come near me. Milo, don’t come near me.’

“And he says, ‘I haven’t got any germs on me, you know that.’ I can remember him saying that to her in the kitchen. She just didn’t quite forgive him for doing that.

“But when they all four had died, she was glad that he had taken over, but she thought that the county should have come in and helped. I don’t know who notified my father that they were sick. Somebody. ... When he went to find out about it, he found out that they were all good and sick — six of them.

“So, though he was strict with his kids, he had a kind heart.

“I can remember him saying, ‘I never would forgive myself, Ruby, if I hadn’t gone down there and helped them.”

“It was really something. The flu took a family down to two people, out of six.

According to state records, Frederick William Brampton, 64, died March 5, 1920. His 14-year-old son, Arthur, died the same day. On March 6, 1920, influenza claimed the life of 13-year-old Freddie M. Brampton, and two days later, it killed Florence’s childhood friend, 5-year-old Mildred Lois Brampton.

Rudyard Kipling once said, “If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.” The recollections of Florence Damon Nagel bring a worldwide tragedy home to a personal level, and it’s a story I’ve never forgotten.

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Julie McDonald, a personal historian from Toledo, may be reached at memoirs@chaptersoflife.com.