Joy Neal Kidney: Dreaded Diseases of the Great Depression

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And we return to our American stories. Up next, a story from our regular contributor, recipient of our Great American Storytelling Award and contest, and a friend of our show, Joy Neal Kidney. Joy is the author of Leora's Letters and Leora's Dexter Stories, two phenomenal books about her family's history. Today, she shares with us a story entitled, Dreaded Diseases of the Great Depression.

Take it away, Joy. Have you ever heard of anyone dying from the mumps or whooping cough? Both profoundly affected Iowa's Gough and Wilson families during the 1920s.

They had already suffered through severe cases of the so-called Spanish influenza early in the decade. Leora, the oldest of Sherd and Laura Gough's big family, was married to Clay Wilson. They had three children by then. Her brother Jennings had returned from the Great War and married Tess, a local Guthrie County girl. In 1921, Jennings and Tess had a daughter, Maxine, who was born the same spring as the Wilson twins. Three years later, Tess gave birth to a son. Both Tess and baby Merrill came down with the mumps.

Merrill was just four days old when his mother died. Jennings and his two small children began to make their home with his parents, Sherd and Laura. When the Wilson family moved to Dexter, the Goughs moved there as well. Along with many others, both families had lost their farms after the Great War. Having been encouraged to go into debt for land, they were shocked that farm prices severely slumped. Clay Wilson hired out as a tenant farmer, but when that soured, the family moved to the edge of Dexter where they could at least keep their cow. By 1928, farm jobs had dried up, along with the Wilsons' cow.

Clay sold the cow for $75. By then, they had seven children. They made out a large order to Sears, Roebuck and Company for food in bulk, including oatmeal, gallons of sorghum, large jars of peanut butter, clothes, boots, winter coats, and one Christmas present for each youngster.

Bleak days of winter were upon them. Leora was in a family way again, with a baby due soon. In January of 1929, twins Jack and Jean were born. The babies were about three weeks old when the family moved from the outskirts of Dexter into a drab greenhouse on the street just south of the home of the extended Gough family.

The Wilson youngsters looked forward to having cousins Maxine and Meryl as their neighbors. Right away, Clay set up a stove in the new house and laid a fire, so it would be warm when the youngest ones arrived. A few kids at a time rode in the Model T with their mother's stickery asparagus fern and other houseplants and dozens of mason jars filled with whatever Leora had been able to preserve from the garden. All nine children, even the babies, came down with colds. It was not long before their coughs grew serious with a deep telltale croup. A doctor confirmed indeed they had all come down with whooping cough.

A quarantine sign was posted on the front door as the disease spreads very easily. Clay and Leora, who both had whooping cough as children, strewed newspapers upstairs on the wooden floors beside the children's beds with ashes in the center to catch the phlegm that they spit up. Short of breath, after deep coughing, the kids would fall to their knees and gasp for air. Donald fainted during a coughing episode. Newspapers covered the downstairs floors as well.

What a miserable time for the entire family. Every morning, Clay gathered up those stench-filled newspapers to burn in the stove and arranged fresh ones on the floors. Every few days, Leora sent the children upstairs to snuggle under blankets in bed to stay warm while she aired out the house, scoured everything, and mopped the floors with disinfectant. When the stove warmed up the kitchen again, she called the youngsters, come down. The room smelled so clean and medicine-y.

Darling remembered that decades later. The seven-year-old felt warm and safe, crouched behind the wood stove. One night, Clay heard scuffling and squeaking of bedsprings overhead. Dale was nearly unconscious in the disheveled bed, with his head caught in the curves of the wrought iron headboard.

The boy was too weak to free himself. Clay went for the doctor who prescribed medicine for Dale, who had developed pneumonia, and also checked Doris' bloodshot eye. She had coughed so hard that her blood vessel broke.

The doctor said to use eye drops, probably boric acid. Those baby twins gasped and cried. They gagged when Leora tried to nurse them. The harried parents held them upside down, using fingers to work phlegm from their tiny mouths. So that Clay and Leora could get some rest, Jenningscough, who had had disease as a child, stayed with the Wilsons at night to help. Pertussis or whooping cough is most dangerous in infants. The doctor suggested spooning a little whiskey down their throats to try to clear them.

But it didn't do any good. Baby Jack died, then two days later, so did Jean. They were five weeks old. The local newspaper noted that the school had sent a bouquet, and so had the Rebecca Lodge, of which grandmother was a member. Neighbors had taken up a collection for flowers, carnations. The spicy scent of carnations forever after would take Doris back to when she was ten years old, and the funeral for the baby twins.

Called the 100-day cough the miserable disease can last weeks. Delbert and Donald were in the eighth grade, and ended up missing a whole grading period at school. There was talk about holding them back a year, but they wanted to graduate with their classmates.

The teachers agreed that if the boys would double down on their studies and take a special test, they could graduate, which they did. These days, most of us have gotten the DTP vaccination, which protects against diphtheria, tetanus, and whooping cough. A mumps vaccine wasn't developed until 1967.

These days, it's hard to imagine the loss of a young mother to mumps, or to imagine the hardship of caring for nine children with such a dreadful disease as whooping cough, then losing infants because of it. And a beautiful job on the production by Monty Montgomery, and a special thanks to Joy Neal Kidney for sharing so many of the stories of her family. And it's hard to remember what life was like before we were here. As a comedian recently said, there was life before us, and before you. And my goodness, my dad and I would travel around the country, we'd always go to Civil War battlefields and under graveyards and cemeteries. And always there would be these little plots, little baby plots, every family losing a three-year-old, a one-year-old, miscarriages, the amount of death experienced by families. And right here in this one family, losing two five-week-olds to whooping cough and having to bury those little babies. A remarkable story about America, living through hard times, farming life, falling prices, the Great Depression, no jobs, bleak winter months, mason jars. And, my goodness, a stove that warmed the house. And reminding us what America was and still is, family still loved, and family still lived and thrived.

The story of America, the story of Des Moines, and Joy Neal Kidney's family here on Our American Story. Hello there, I'm Ann Thompson, editor-at-large for IndieWire. And I'm IndieWire's deputy film editor, Ryan Lattanzio. And we're the co-hosts of IndieWire's weekly ScreenTalk podcast. Join us each week for an in-depth discussion of the latest in film and TV industry news with special guests along the way, including filmmakers and executives. Hear from us every Friday morning on iHeart platforms or wherever you get your podcasts as IndieWire shares what we've learned from the movie week that was.

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