Some Observations from the Hill
by Hub Brown  

I've been reading about the flu epidemic that is running wild among poultry and wild birds. It reminded me of the Spanish Influenza that was killing apparently healthy people here near the end of World War I. We had already had a school closing earlier that year caused by Infantile Paralysis. And then along come the Flu Epidemic. 

 Frank Michaels, who is my son Jim's father-in-law, told me of how his mother came down with it and died in 1918. The authorities came at night and carried her away with a horse and wagon and buried her and then loaded all her clothes, her bedding, and things she had been in close contact with and burned them. This was similar to what they did with people and their belongings back in the days of the Black Plague. 

 The nearest the flu ever came to any of us, I had a good friend in school, Johnny Colisky, who had a big rugged healthy brother who died from it. The Colishsys were Polish. Frank Michael's family were Polish. It seemed that the flu was especially hard an apparently healthy Polish people. Some time ago I read an article about as man that decided to find a reason for this. He found that quite some time ago there had been a flu epidemic in Europe that had been quite severe in Poland but that it had come in the winter time and there had been very little travel or communication between a lot of those small mountain towns. The flu had run through the larger towns and villages so the ones that lived through that had built an immunity so that a lot of Polish people had never been exposed to it.

 In Saturday's paper, a lady had a list of things to do to prevent getting the flu. She listed all the obvious precautions and not to use any paper that had been used once, but Frank said she missed one sure preventative. He had heard that a little kerosene was good so he took a teaspoonful every day.

 Lot of old country people came over to America to work in the hard coal mines. When the anthracite began to run out or because friends of theirs told them of the good things that Endicott Johnson did for their workers they would come to the Triple Cities and then as Ronald Reagan remarked one time when he visited here, they would ask, "Which way E.J.?"

 E.J. was way ahead of its time with free medical, dental, eye care, hospitalization, and a chance to buy a house out of your wages. But after a while, cheaper shoes, substitutions for sole leather, changes in management all had their affect and E.J. began to decline, plants were shut down and IBM began buying them and soon 
E.J. was a thing of the past. 

 I get to thinking of the good times we used to have for I retired before things got real bad. I remember a little fellow who had been a Cossack in the Russian Cavalry. I told him how we'd always heard what great fighters the Cossacks were and I asked him why he thought they were so good. He said, "Because we were always hungry." I asked him how much pay did he get, and he said about 50¢ a month and said that they had to buy leather polish for the leather out of that.