Candle Stick: A Family Memory from the 1918 Pandemic
By Bruce Hood
Sun contributor
Since we seem to have a fair bit of time on our hands, I thought I would share a family story to bring us closer together even though we are farther apart.
Some of you know my maternal grandmother, Beulah Abigail Holliday Whitson, who was a ward nurse in Traverse City at the old State Hospital. The state hospital was built because of Traverse City “founding father” Perry Hannah and his political influence; there were only two other psychiatric hospitals in the state, Pontiac and Kalamazoo. Dr. James Munson was the first director of the facility and he believed in “beauty is therapy” as well as “work is therapy”. Kindness, comfort, and pleasure were treatments, and to that end the grounds became an arboretum of sorts, as a diversity of trees were planted to go along with the many greenhouses and farms on the property all supported by the patients’ work. There is a statue of the world record dairy cow, Traverse Colantha Walker, that lived at the hospital (in the barns) in the 1910s-’30s. The institution also served during outbreaks of tuberculosis, typhoid, diphtheria, influenza and polio. Later it was also a location for care of the elderly, “rehab” for drug and alcohol addicts, as well as a training institution for nurses.
My mom, Mary Lou Whitson Hood, would tell stories of waiting with her sister for my grandmother to get off shift while they played on the grounds and watched some of the more colorful patients climbing the screens of the porches around Building 50.
My grandmother was born and raised in the little town of Norwood, in the middle of nowhere on the shore of Lake Michigan, northwest of Atwood and west of US-31. Later they moved to Traverse City and lived on the corner of Spruce and 6th street, two blocks from Munson Hospital. (My maternal grandfather was born in Bates, out along the train tracks on the way to Williamsburg on M-72. He was the postmaster of Traverse City for a long time.)
When my Grandma was in training, she went to Ann Arbor for a while to train in the larger hospitals and lo and behold, we had another pandemic, the “Spanish Flu” in 1918. She was sent to Chicago to work at Cook County Hospital in the influenza wards as a very young woman. During those times, of course, quarantine was about the only way to control the spread of the virus and so she was sequestered in the hospital for many weeks. Without the ready use of a phone or other means of communication, her brother Victor gave her this candle stick (featured in the photo) for Christmas to be used as a simple means to let him know that she was OK. Every night after her shift, she would place this candle in the window of her dorm room and light it to let him know that she was OK.
She finished her training and survived the pandemic to return home to their new life with Harry, her husband, in Traverse City, settling into their new home on 10th street where they lived until retirement. Harry made it through World War I and, as I wrote, eventually became the postmaster of Traverse City. Later he would lose a leg to an embolism and they retired and moved up to Buffy Hill Rd,, up by the Country Club where they had a nice view of West Grand Traverse Bay. When I was in middle school the “new” Junior High was built on Silver Lake Rd. and most days after school I would walk to their house down Silver Lake, down 14th and up Veterans Drive and hang with the grandparents until mom would drive out from Interlochen after work to pick me up. So there you go. A little local history. Most of it true.
Bruce Hood chairs the science department at The Leelanau School in Glen Arbor.
