In late May, Jeff Kato of Balancing Environment and Rehabilitation (BEAR), the nonprofit rehabbing Glen Haven’s historic Sleeping Bear Inn, found this bottle of Foley’s Cough Syrup—a concoction of 7% alcohol, honey and pine tar made popular during the 1918 flu epidemic—behind the baseboard in one of the guest rooms. The cough syrup has reappeared for the COVID-19 pandemic.
My grandmother, Beulah Abigail Holliday Whitson, worked as a young woman at Cook County Hospital in Chicago during the 1918 Spanish Flu. As such, she was quarantined in the hospital for many weeks. Her brother Victor gave her a candle stick 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 the candle in the window of her dorm room and light it to let him know that she was still alive.