Dreaded Diseases of the Great Depression

On this episode of Our American Stories, award-winning storyteller Joy Neal Kidney shares a deeply personal family history from the Great Depression, when common childhood illnesses could still be deadly. Drawing from her Iowa roots, Kidney recounts how mumps and whooping cough devastated two related families already struggling with poverty, farm loss, and scarce medical care. In one household, nine children fell ill at once, and twin infants did not survive. Through vivid detail and remembered hardship, Joy's story reminds us how fragile life once was, and how much modern medicine and vaccinations have changed everyday survival. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we returned 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 Neil Kidney Joy is the author of Leora's Letters
and Leora's Dexter Stories, two phenomenal books about her family's history. Today,

(00:31):
she shares with us a story entitled Dreaded Diseases of
the Great Depression?

Speaker 2 (00:37):
Take it away, Joy? Have you ever heard of anyone dying?
From the monks? Or whooping cough? Both profoundly affected Iowa's
Goff and Wilson families during the nineteen twenties. They had
already suffered through severe cases of the so called Spanish influenza.

(00:59):
Early in the day, Kate Leora, the oldest of Sheridan
and Laura Goff'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 nineteen twenty one. Jennings and Tess

(01:20):
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

(01:40):
to make their home with his parents, Sherd and Laura.
When the Wilson family moved to Dexter, the Goths 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

(02:02):
tenant farmer, but when that soured, the family moved to
the edge of Dexter, where they could at least keep
their cow. By nineteen twenty eight, farm jobs had dried up,
along with the Wilson's cow. Klag sold the cow for
seventy five dollars. By then they had seven children. They

(02:25):
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 her family way again with

(02:48):
a baby do soon. In January of nineteen twenty nine,
twins Jack and Jean were born. The babies were about
three weeks old when the family moved from the outskirts
of Dexter into a drabbed green house on the street
just south of the home of the extended Gough family.
The Wilson youngsters looked forward to having cousins Maxine and

(03:10):
Merrill 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 tea
with their mother's stickery, asparagus, fern and other house plants,
and dozens of masonjars filled with whatever Leora had been

(03:32):
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

(03:54):
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.

(04:15):
Short of breath after deep coughing, the kids would fold
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

(04:39):
gathered up those stench field 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

(05:00):
stove warmed up the kitchen again, she called the youngsters
come down. The room smelled so clean and medicine 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

(05:22):
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's bloodshot eye. She had coughed so hard

(05:43):
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

(06:04):
get some rest. Jenningscoff, who had had diseases a child,
stayed with the Wilsons at night to help. Pertussis or
whooping cough, is most dangerous in infants. The doctors suggested
spooning a little whiskey down their throats to try to
clear them, but it didn't do any good. Baby Jack

(06:26):
died then two days later, so did Jeanne. They were
five weeks old. The local newspaper noted that the school
had sent a bouquet, and so had the Rebecca Lodge,

(06:47):
of which grandmother was a member. Neighbors had taken up
a collection for flowers carnations. The spicy scent of carnations
Forever After would take Doors back to when she was
ten years old, and the funeral for the baby twins
called the one hundred day cough. The miserable disease can

(07:09):
last weeks. Delbert and Donald were in the eighth grade
and ended up missing a whole grating 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.

(07:33):
These days, most of us have gotten the DTP vaccination,
which protects against diphtheria, tetanus, and whooping cough. A month's
vaccine wasn't developed until nineteen sixty seven. These days, it's
hard to imagine the loss of a young mother to momps,
or to imagine the hardship of caring for nine children

(07:55):
with such a dreadful disease as whooping cough, then losing
infants because of it.

Speaker 1 (08:04):
And a beautiful job on the production by Monte Montgomery,
and a special thanks to joy Neil 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, would always go to Civil

(08:25):
War battlefields and on the graveyards and cemeteries, and always
there will 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, the
whooping cough and having to bury those little babies. A

(08:46):
remarkable story about America living through hard times, farming life,
falling prices, the Great Depression, no jobs, bleak winter months,
mas jars, and my goodness, a stowe that warmed the house,
and reminding us what America was and still is. Family
still loved, and family still lived and thrived. The story

(09:09):
of America, the story of des Moines, and join Neil
Kidney's family here, a now American story