Augusta Mail Boy Flees Spanish Flu Epidemic

The current health crisis caused by the Corona Virus reminds us that viruses have posed an enormous challenge to public health throughout history and have often occurred without any apparent pattern or cause. Before the dawn of the scientific age (and even later), they were sometimes interpreted as expressions of the wrath of God. Even today the ability to control outbreaks of viruses is perhaps the greatest health challenge we face.

It has been hypothesized that viruses endure and mutate in domestic animals, emerging to wreak havoc. I am no student of medicine, but this would certainly seem to explain to some extent how the arrival of European explorers like Columbus, Magellan, Pizzaro, DeSoto and even Captain Cook generated epidemics throughout the non-western world.

Pigs and other livestock brought to the “New World” may have been a contributing factor in the epidemics that killed literally millions of Native Americans.  The image of a handful of explorers being the cause of this may seem far-fetched at first. But today we are aware of how the exponential multiplier effect works. Initial contacts with Europeans Infected Native Americans who in turn passed these diseases on to an ever-expanding circle of contacts through trade and war, spreading the European diseases to people who might never have encountered a European explorer or settler. One theory about the origin of the “Corona virus” is that it came from a bat that was butchered in a Chinese market and entered human beings when eaten.  Viruses are unlike diseases spread by germs, of course, and viruses “morph” creating challenges for researchers.

For my grandparents’ generation, the “Spanish Flu” (Influenza) was the great killer. As World War I ended, armies were being dismantled, but in that transition period from war to peace, soldiers returning from Europe carried with them a virus that was spreading world- wide. For soldiers stationed at many posts and awaiting discharge, outbreaks of the flu caused the death of literally tens of thousands of military personnel and spread quickly into the civilian towns that were home to military bases.

My grandfather, Calvin Sego, described his encounter with the “flu” to me on his deathbed in 1977. Perhaps he had waited for me to mature and could be better able to understand the importance of the most the most memorable of his life’s experiences. Perhaps it was because he knew it would be his only opportunity to speak to me of these events. He was dying of cancer, but his mind and memory were clear. He was a much-loved son, husband, parent and grandparent.  He grew up in Augusta, Georgia where his father and grandfather had been blacksmiths and wheelwrights.

Of course, automobiles and factories were making blacksmiths obsolete and Calvin’s father was eking out a living by fishing for Sturgeon in the nearby Savannah River, a fish that could grow to twelve feet in length or more.  He would catch the huge fish on “trot” lines, long lines with many baited hooks. He would keep the fish alive on a “stringer.” When he had a haul big enough to make it profitable, he butchered the fish for their roe (eggs) which he sold as caviar to a local merchant who shipped them to far away hotels and restaurants in Savannah, New Orleans and even New York. Still, it was a precarious way to make a living and Calvin and his siblings could expect little help in beginning a career or getting an education.

Work in the cotton mills that were booming during the war was a prospect Calvin’s mother could not bear. She used a family connection -her father-in-law was a policeman- to get Calvin a job at the city post office. His duties included picking up the mail bags destined for Fort Hancock each morning and delivering them, riding his bicycle over unpaved and rutted clay roads. Nearby Fort Hancock was one of the largest military bases in the country and many of the troops stationed there were just returning from France; or,  were simply never deployed and were stuck there waiting to be mustered out.

Under orders from the administration of President Woodrow Wilson, enlisted soldiers were to be quickly discharged, a policy that would soon flood the labor market with millions of young men and send the country into an economic tailspin. But for the moment they were still in the army and crammed into close quarters in the temporary barracks that had been built as part of the buildup to America’s enormous, if brief, involvement in the First World War.

Almost overnight Calvin’s job turned into a nightmare. He arrived one morning to find the gates to Fort Hancock locked and guarded by armed soldiers. The place reeked with the stench of burning flesh. Calvin watched as the bodies of young men were brought out on stretchers and cast onto huge fires, young men who had died suddenly and by the hundreds of the Spanish Flu. Cremation was simply the fastest way to dispose of soldiers’ remains if there were any hope of halting the contagion.

 For weeks, Calvin was greeted by the same gruesome scene as he arrived and tossed the mail sacks over the fence, bags filled with letters from parents and friends, lovers and wives, letters that would never be opened or answered. Loved ones were still celebrating the end of the war, anticipating the safe return of their fathers and sons from a war that had cost millions of lives. American casualties amounted to over 50,000, even though American troops had only been deployed on the western front for only about six months. The Flu would claim far more American lives than the war in Europe. Now, this turn of fate must have cast  the emotions of soldiers and their families from the heights of glorious relief to the depths of heartache as they learned of these men’s unanticipated deaths -and of the illness and death of the many nurses whose heroic caregiving placed them at risk as well.

Calvin’s experience would certainly fit the description we now hear so overused: “surreal.”  It was certainly traumatic for a boy of seventeen who had never ventured far from family or beyond the small city in which he lived.  It altered his life’s course and that of the family he would father.  He resolved to leave Augusta, the city where his family had lived for generations. He caught a train to a small town, Gough, that had recently been founded about 25 miles south of Augusta along a new railroad line that connected the farming backcountry with Augusta, Macon and Atlanta -and points more distant.

Calvin had a bit of experience working in the Baker Electric automobile repair shop in Augusta; and, he had taken a class in mechanical studies at the Catholic Technical School for Boys He had worked alongside his father and grandfather in their blacksmith shops. Not long after arriving in Gough, e bought a blacksmith shop on credit and soon converted it into a repair shop for automobiles. There were no tractors in use in this farming region at the time, but he knew there soon would be as they were becoming essential to large scale farming, especially cotton farming in the region where Gough was located. Calvin learned to repair them. When he told me this story in nineteen-seventy-seven from his hospital bed, he had been repairing tractors for nearly sixty years.   Calvin (“Pop” to his children and grandchildren) spoke in a calm and affectionate manner as he told this and many other stories. He knew I was to visit that particular day and it seemed to me that he had carefully cataloged his stories for the telling.  I was his first grandchild and I had spent many hours with him at his tractor garage in the little town of Gough, a town I often refer to as “God’s Smallest Place” in my writing.

My mother, Mamie, Pop’s daughter, was always eager for our family to visit Gough on weekends.  Pop had encouraged me to attend college and he knew I was studying to become a historian.  It turned out that he was a historian as well, preserving the past by telling his story to me. And, the choices he made in 1918 anticipated  the “back to the farm” movement that was popular in the 1920’s and 1930’s and which foreshadowed the “back to nature” aspirations of many young people even today.