Rubela Is Not Extinct

    Do you recall your history of the settling of America? Remember how you learned that one of the worst things the white man brought to these shores was smallpox and measles? Indian villages were decimated when either disease struck. And measles was just about as bad as smallpox in its effect on native populations.

     Measles was never a disease to discount, even for Europeans who had been exposed to it most of their lives. And it wasn’t any fun for a kid in 1943 either. Because of the warning that it could harm a child’s eyes, the sick room was kept dark, making reading or playing nearly impossible. 

     Measles caused permanent deafness in countless people, and the complications from other diseases made it a very real threat to survival.

     I remember when the measles vaccine was announced. It was almost too good to be true. Each of my four children were vaccinated, and it was a relief to know that they would never get the disease.

    Fast forward to 2014. For several years there have periodically been scary articles published that the measles vaccine causes harm to some children. The  result is that thousands of parents decided to opt out of the vaccination program. So now we have thousands of people who are completely unprotected.

    Measles is a highly contagious respiratory disease caused by a virus named rubella. The symptoms are fever, runny nose, cough and a rash all over the body. Very often a sick child will also get an ear infection or pneumonia, and then they are very sick.

    If measles had been stamped out all over the world, similar to what has happened to polio, there would be no problem. But the rubella virus is alive and well in many of the underdeveloped nations of the world.

    From January 1 to April 20 more than 26,000 suspected and 6,000 confirmed cases of measles have been reported in the Philippines. As of May 23, 22 U.S. travelers, mostly unvaccinated, who returned from the Philippines have become sick with measles.

Since measles is a virus, antibiotics won’t cure the disease, and the ailment has been rare enough in the past 25 years that doctors often don’t recognize it.

    The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) now recommends that travelers to the Philippines protect themselves by making sure they are vaccinated against measles, particularly infants 6 - 11 months of age (1 dose of measles vaccine) and children 12 months or older (2 doses of measles vaccine). Likewise, adults should be vaccinated before any foreign travel.

    Isn’t it interesting how people get complacent? No one they know has gotten sick with measles, so it must be safe to leave their children (and often themselves) unprotected. In this case ignorance is definitely NOT bliss.

Who's To Say?

My mother was 16 in 1932 when the country was in the depths of the Great Depression. She had one dress, and since she was the tallest female in the family, there were no hand-me-downs. It was a painful time to be a teenager, and the privations she suffered molded her attitude toward possessions. They were purchased after much deliberation, not taken lightly and not thrown away until there was absolutely no “good” left in them.
Like most of the people who were young during WWII, I remember ration cards, underpants without elastic (they kept falling down), the thrill of  going to the grocery store that had just got in a shipment of bananas, black-outs (even though we were a tiny town in the middle of the country), and the uncertainty that comes from not knowing if our country would win or not. There was a “waste-not, want-not” attitude that clings to this day.
The “Boomers,” the “X Generation,” and the “Millennials” all have characteristics shaped by the political condition of the country, but over the past 50 years there has emerged the attitude that nothing should be saved if it doesn’t have a current use. If something has hung in your closet for a year without being worn, get rid of it. That jar that the pickles came in is just garbage, not something you might use to store left-overs. Old tires are an expensive nuisance to get rid of. When you get tired of a piece of furniture, you just pitch it out and buy new. And if saving stuff is silly, hoarding is a sin or a disease.
The quandary for humans today is deciding what is treasure and what is trash. For many it’s simply saying, “Am I going to use this in the next 3 months?” If the answer is “no,” out it goes. Not for them the crowded closets, overflowing junk drawers, or crammed book cases.
For the rest of us, the decision making is not so easy. Who wouldn’t like to have the very first Batman comic book that you bought for a dime in 1940? The first Barbie doll even in played-with condition is worth a mint to doll collectors. The original  Pez Dispenser that you played with and then pitched would buy you a fancy meal today. The Cracker-Jack tiny metal racer was so insignificant that you didn’t even think about throwing it away. Carnival glass dishes were freebies in boxes of soap. And so on and on.
The trouble is that we can’t tell what is going to have value in the future. That’s bothersome to most of us, but to some it is frightening. And because they cannot know what will have value in the future, they save it all. They become buried in their accumulations and ridiculed for being foolish…or sick.
Perhaps it would be better if we stepped back in our judgementalism and considered these souls as “rescuers.” Rescuers of the trivial and mundane so that in the future these things will not be forgotten.
Most of what they save is probably trash, but mixed into the heaps of stuff will be treasures, things that the contemporary Discarders may even pay good money for at an estate auction and proudly display in their tidy homes.

Published in the Woodford County News Bulletin, 21 May 2014

Walking Home

When I was a freshman at Woodruff High School, we lived on North Jefferson and I walked the 10 or so blocks to and from school. On the way home, I often encountered three grade school aged kids, a boy and two girls returning home from Greely Grade School which right across the street from our apartment house. The smallest girl was always walking up in the grass.

I was shy at the time (I’ve gotten over that, thank goodness), and didn’t really know how to handle saying ‘hi’ every time we met, so often I would cross the street and walk down the other side so I didn’t have to say hello. Seems silly now, but that’s how it was. During my sophomore year we moved  to Dechman Street so I no longer met them when I was walking home.

Occasionally I’d see a dark-haired, older boy going into the house where the three kids lived, but I merely noted the fact and didn’t think any more about it.

Fast-forward a year.

Ronnie Marshall was going to run for school president and he noticed that I was always drawing, so he thought I might be an addition to his campaign committee. The time of the first meeting arrived (February 1954), and Buddy Curtis was to pick me up and take me to another committee member’s house; I think she lived on North Madison across from the Episcopal Church. Someday I’m going to remember to drive down that street and see if my memory is right or if it’s all haywire.

On the way, Buddy was to pick up some boy who was playing in the Woodruff High Jazz Band. There was another boy in the pick-up truck, but I can’t remember who he was. He and Buddy kept talking about how this guy they were to pick up was so funny!

We waited just awhile and out came a guy from the school, and we four (in the front seat of a pick-up) headed the few blocks to the meeting place. All evening I noticed the “funny” boy, and he was indeed funny. Kept everyone in stitches.

I looked for him at school the next week, but didn’t see him. The next meeting of the committee came, and we managed to be sitting next to each other all evening and in the back of the pick-up on the way to my house.

Fast forward again.

The funny fellow turned out to be Jim Fyke. We’ve been married 54 years now, and he still keeps me in stitches.

The three kids I met on Madison Street were his brother and sisters, Gary, Mary Ellen and Barbara. The boy entering the house was probably him.

Soon I was a frequent visitor at 1209 NE Madison. We dated for 5 years before we could afford to get married.

Fast forward yet again.

At the gathering of the five Fyke siblings in June 2013, Barbara (the youngest, the one who walked in the grass) said that the three of them often talked about the pretty girl they met on the street. She and Mary Ellen noticed that the girl had a leather purse! And a camelhair coat! And they wondered if she were nice or snooty. I had no idea they even noticed me, let alone remembered so many details.

You know, I can never tell teen agers that their high school loves are just passing infatuations, because Jim and I fell in love when we were just 17 and 15, and I can’t imagine having lived the last 59 years (54 married, 5 dating) without him.

Tina and the Electric Plug

   At our recent Fyke family gathering, the five ‘kids’ were reminiscing about their youthful experiences. Barbara (the youngest) said her mother was the very best at instilling fear in her. She said, “She had me so scared of electrical plugs that all she had to do was point one at me and I thought killing electricity was going to jump out of those two prongs and strike me!”

   Then Harvey added that they were darned lucky to have had a mother. He told of a time when he was about 3 or 4, which must have been about 1940---he heard the story from one of his parents much later. They lived in an apartment in Peoria. It had limited electricity, and the only place to plug in the electric iron was into an outlet hanging on a cord from the ceiling.

   One afternoon Willis came home to a completely dark house. He asked what happened, and Tina just said that the lights went out. He went to the basement and put in some new fuses, and all was fine. Except that he saw a table knife with a very blackened tip lying on the table. He quizzed Tina on it and learned that she couldn’t get the iron’s plug out of the socket, so she stuck the knife in there to pry the two apart.

   Then Jim remembered seeing that knife around for years and years, and suddenly all their memories coalesced and they had the whole picture, and Barbara finally learned why Tina frightened her so about electric plugs.

Grandma's Funeral

First you have to understand that Grandma and Grandpa were not church goers. In fact, Grandpa Hammond told everyone he was a Christian Scientist, because they were ignorant people in good old New Boston who were afraid of anything that was as strange and unusual as Christian Science. And also, he had learned that Christian Scientists didn't believe in doctors and medicine, and proclaiming he was one of them kept him from being hounded to go to the doctor. As far as I know, he never had any actual contact with a member of that faith.

You need also to know that Grandma was a musician. When she was a girl, she played the piano in a movie theater run by her mother, providing "mood" music to whatever was going on on the silent screen. She sang well and she appreciated good music of all kinds.

Grandma was raised a Baptist, but there was no Baptist church in town. When she died, my Aunt Mary came from California to take care of things. She made arrangements for burial in the New Windsor Cemetery and hired the local Baptist minister to do the grave side rites. The minister's wife played the autoharp (or was it a zither?), and she and her husband would sing "Nearer My God to Thee."

The day of the funeral arrived and it was cold and windy, but at least there was no snow on the ground. We all trooped to the cemetery where there was a tent to keep off some of the wind, just SOME of the wind. It blew through like only a prairie wind can blow.

The minister decided it was time for Grandpa to 'come to Jesus' and he set out to tell Grandpa the error of his ways for keeping Grandma away from the church all those years. At least that's how I remember it. Never a kind word was said about our wonderful, laughing, kind Grandma. I don't know if he was preaching eternal damnation or not, but that's how it seemed to me.

Then the preacher and his wife began their rendition of the old hymn. He was a pretty decent singer, and she wasn't bad as a musician, but the wind blowing so steadily apparently dried out a string...or something. Anyway about 2/3 through the first verse she hit the sourest note you ever heard. Then when they got to the same place on the next verse, she didn't avoid it. She waded right in and played that bad note again.

Joy, Corrine (Joy's mother) and I were red in the face from having to hold in our laughter. We could just imagine Grandma cringing in her casket at that awful screech. As soon as we could get behind the nearby shed, we dissolved into uncontrollable laughter. Just then Aunt Sally came around the building and thought we were sobbing. Our family not being comfortable with outward displays of emotion, she turned around and went back the way she came.

They say laughter and tears aren't far apart, and on that cold day in February, we couldn't have agreed more...and I dare say, Grandma was laughing right along with us.

Gladys Lelia McUne Hammond 1890 - 1970