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October 1918: For Americans, it was perhaps the best of times and the very worst of times.
The anticipated armistice of the Great War, where U.S. soldiers were helping to rout the enemy, was only a few weeks away.
On the homefront, though, the mothers and fathers, the sons and daughters, the wives and sweethearts of those Doughboys fought an equally demonic foe, a sickness that would kill about 500,000 Americans in less than a year.
More Americans died from the so-called Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918 and 1919 than all the U.S. combat deaths in all of the wars of the 20th century.
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Masked Community: Wearing masks was one of the few things people could do to try to combat the deadly Spanish flu epidemic in Los
Angeles and throughout the Unites States. In Many cities, people who needed to save their homes required to wear the masks.
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There are only a small group of Americans - all in their late 80s and older - who can remember what experts call the "pandemic," in which a deadly strain of the flu killed more than 20 million people worldwide.
Bernice Clark of Claremont was an 11-year-old girl when her family left the relative isolation of a farm to move to the small town of Kawanee, Ill., during the latter weeks of the epidemic.
"Once we moved into town, my whole family came down with it in 12 hours," she recalled. "The problem was there was no one to take care of us. We even had to hire someone just to take care of the furnace for us, and in the winter that was something important.
"It was so difficult to get help. I think we were able to get a doctor out to see us only once."
The situation in Kawanee was no different than anywhere else as the flu toll rose. Doctors and nurses soon were in short supply. Needed services - police, fire, hospitals, telephone, trash collection, food preparation - were limited as technicians and repair people also fell victim.
In some Eastern cities, there were not enough people to build coffins or dig graves, and the dead were stored for a time rather than being buried.
The flu itself ravaged East Coast cities first, especially New England, but reached the West Coast with equal vigor. Initially, not everyone took the epidemic seriously.
The Ontario Daily Report of Oct. 11, 1918, advised, "Don't scare yourself into the Spanish influenza," noting many people had an unjustified fear that the epidemic had arrived in the Inland Valley. "There is nothing to be frightened about. Many wild rumors are heard at times É but the Report looked at the situation locally and found nothing to be alarmed at."
One day later, however, Ontario's City Council ordered all schools closed as well as churches, libraries, theaters and
other places of public gathering because of the flu. Other cities followed suit.
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EPEDEMIC: Bernice Clark holds a photo of herself and her cousin take a couple of years after she battled the flu in 1919.
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Ontario's first recorded death was 28-year-old telephone employee Joseph Morgon, who died Oct. 21, though by then as many as eight members of the Latino labor community, mostly infants, were reported dead in the Guasti area outside the city limits.
Conditions among "the Mexicans" were reported - in the politically incorrect style of the times - to be particularly serious.
"The great trouble is to keep the Mexicans from congregating about a sick person and the disease has undoubtedly been spread by the Mexican custom of holding wakes over a dead body," the paper wrote. J.B. Draper, whose name lives on in the Inland Valley as part of the Draper Mortuary in Ontario, reportedly prevented family members of flu victims from being near a body after the death.
Mexicans weren't the only ethnic group disparaged because of the flu. Germans were actually blamed for bringing the bug to American shores. Under a headline, "Blame Teutons for Epidemic of New Disease ..." Lt. Col. P.S. Doan, head of the health section of the shipping board, warned that German agents could have imported the flu as an act of war, releasing it into theaters and other places where people congregated.
"It is quite possible the epidemic was started by Huns sent ashore by Boche submarine commanders," he said. The U.S. government later discounted that report.
People went to extremes in other ways when dealing with the flu.
The Daily Report urged people to carry tissue paper to put over a public telephone mouthpiece when making a call. "Avoid kissing, and dodge the Spanish flu!" was one headline.
"It is not the influenza in itself that proves fatal," declared Dr. C.L. Emmons, Ontario public health officer, "but the complications that follow, as pneumonia, bronchitis, etc. All should avoid the common drinking cup and eating utensils. Be out in the fresh air and keep away from those who have colds."
Claremont's Dean Bowman, 89, remembers how the flu swept into the small Indiana village of Chalmers where he lived as a boy. It quickly claimed his cousin as well as a best friend.
"It was no respecter of age - children, middle-aged people, the old - they all got it. The terrible thing is you never knew where it was coming from. If you survived, it was just the luck of the draw," said Bowman, who was 9 at the time.
There was medicine, though unproven and ineffective, but it was an elixir of hope during desperate times.
Bowman's 13-year-old brother became a hero during the epidemic when he was sent to bring medicine for Chalmers' residents.
"In the middle of a snowstorm, this 13-year-old drove a car all the way to Lafayette 18 miles away and back to get the medicine for us," Bowman said.
The flu made its way into the snowy northern reaches of Maine, to the community of Caribou, where Ruth Allee, 92, of Claremont was growing up. "It was a very scary time for us when we realized it had reached our township. We just tried to keep warm and stay inside. That was all you could do."
Pomona's Margaretha Barber was a 10-year-old resident of Grafton, Mass., when she contracted the flu.
"I remember that my great aunt sat next to my bed and cared for me by reading Dickens to me for days," she said. "I think everybody in my house was sick, except for my mother, and I think she was sick, too, but she just stayed up to help us."
Judy Applebee of Claremont was born five years after the epidemic but remembers a story her late husband Robert told her of the flu's impact on his youth in Old Town, Maine.
"When he was 6 months old, everyone in his family had the flu, and they decided to get him out of the household to protect him," said Applebee.
"He was taken to the home of a minister in the town who had two daughters who would care for him. He found out later the two girls had asked their father, 'If the baby's parents die, could we keep him?' " Fortunately for Robert Applebee, his parents survived.
In many big cities, including Los Angeles and San Francisco, residents wore masks in a somewhat futile attempt to protect themselves from the flu. M. Ella Chaffey, daughter of one of Ontario's founding Chaffey brothers, wrote of her own experiences with such precautions while living in Northern California.
"A muslin mask must be worn by everyone over nose and mouth," she recalled in a memoir. "I loathed the filthy things, yet dared not go to town without slipping into one.
"I remember there was a boy living near us who had scarlet fever, according to the notice on the door. One day I met him at the street car station and said, 'I'm glad to see you are well of your scarlet fever.' 'Oh, that wasn't nothing,' he said. 'But I'm sure glad I didn't have that there flu!' "
The toll from influenza rose throughout the country as the sickness ran its course. Between September 1918 and March 1919, 3,100 died in Los Angeles from the flu and its ensuing pneumonia, 3,700 in San Francisco. More than 33,000 died during that period in New York City.
Then, it was over. The reason is still a bit disconcerting.
"The virus just ran out of hosts," said Dr. Dawn A. Fairley, assistant professor of family medicine at the Western University of Health Services in Pomona. Virtually every large population on Earth had been affected, and there were just no more victims.
The virus simply disappeared and has never reappeared. And the great advances in medical science since 1919 provide no guarantee the world is ready to defeat it in the future, Fairley said.
"Even now, there is really nothing that we have to fight the virus. The virus would still be a plague to all of us if it comes back," said the Alta Loma resident. "We have medicines to fight bacteria but we don't have the anti-virals. Viruses are very smart. They are able to change themselves to ward off what we would make to fight them."
Studying the few tissue samples of the virus saved from 1918-19, researchers last week announced they have determined the flu may have incubated in humans for years before it mutated into the deadly strain at that time. Studying lung tissues from two soldiers who died from the Spanish influenza, and from the frozen corpse of an Alaskan woman, researchers have mapped the hemagglutinin gene, which is key to enabling influenza infection to take hold.
The epidemic has one other peculiarity - its anonymity.
Few American histories give it more than passing reference, if at all. The epidemics of polio and AIDS are far more well-known today even though they collectively have claimed far fewer victims over a longer period of time than did this strain of influenza.
"I guess it is just human nature," Fairley said. "When something is that horrible, you just want to black it out and not pass on the memories of it to others."
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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