17-year-old Helena Muffly wrote exactly 100 years ago today:
Sunday, March 24, 1912: Went to Sunday School this afternoon. It was slushy walking and kept on drizzling.
Jimmie threatened with the whooping cough. I don’t want him to get it, nor do I want to get it myself. I would have to stop school if I do, and that I shouldn’t like to.
Her middle-aged granddaughter’s comments 100 years later:
Sounds like miserable weather. Grandma had worried in her March 9 post that she was getting whooping cough—now she had similar worries about her six-year-old brother Jimmy.
Headlines in local newspaper several weeks ago announced epidemic of whooping cough in my county. When I had my annual phyusical last week I had to get a shot for it! Apparently whopping cough is on the rise due to so many people not getting their baby immunizations in the past few years.
We don’t think much about whooping cough today, but it was a real threat in your grandma’s day. Although, I just noticed in the paper that there was a case of whooping cough in one of the outlying areas — possibly in an area where the kids don’t get their immunizations regularly — so even today, it is still a threat to some.
My mom had whooping cough when she was very little. Decades later she talked about how awful it was. It definitely made an impression…
It’s difficult to imagine what it must have been like to worry about catching such a frightening disease…