|
The
gritty Brooklyn waterfront neighborhood where she lived
celebrated mightily, but a grim legacy of the war went on to
take an even deadlier toll.
“People filled the streets. It was so exciting, even though I
wasn’t exactly sure what was happening,” Marie Starace recalled
years later. “They were laughing, crying, and singing. Some men
fired guns into the air.
“A woman fell to her knees in the street with her hands together
as if she was praying. She was crying so hard that looking at
her made me cry, too.” Despite the passage of time, my
grandmother’s eyes filled with tears as she described the scene.
Later in life, during many tea-soaked storytelling sessions with
me about her life, Armistice Day remained a vivid memory for my
grandmother.
The cessation of hostilities had been anticipated for days.
There had even been an inaccurate report of an armistice on Nov.
7. It finally came to pass on Nov. 11, a date the adventurous
little girl, who was mostly called Mary, was sure to remember.
A multitude headed to the 14th Regiment Armory on 8th Avenue in
Brooklyn, she told me, and my grandmother made the long walk
from the docks with them. To this day a bronze of a “doughboy,”
as soldiers in the American Expeditionary Forces were known,
stands there in the name of the “Men of the 14th Infantry who
were engaged in the World War 1917-1918.” The sculpture was
donated by families who lost loved ones in the war.
The crowds swelled and marched on to where soldiers were
gathering near Prospect Park at the Soldiers and Sailors
Memorial Arch, dedicated to those who fought to defend the union
in the U.S. Civil War. The sight of the soldiers brought the
throng to fever pitch.
“Soldiers were already marching by the time I got to the park.
When I saw the parade, I thought they were celebrating my
birthday!”
She marched with them, she said, fondly recalling a soldier who
gave her a nickel. It was a precious gift, good for a small sack
of flour or some apples in a neighborhood where families,
including her own, scraped at times to make ends meet, hard
times made harder by the war.
On the steps of a house not far from where she lived, my
grandmother saw a young man sitting quietly by himself. “I
wondered why he seemed so sad,” she remembered. She asked her
mother, my great-grandmother, about him. “Mamma said, ‘Leave him
alone, Mary. He’s shell-shocked.”
The suffering and deprivation the war wrought hung heavy over
Europe and the United States like so much cannon-fire smoke as
people struggled to restore equilibrium to a shattered world.
Soldiers returned home broken, with mental and physical wounds,
some with lungs burned raw by mustard gas, others with the
Spanish flu, called La Grippe in Europe and “The Grippe” in
Brooklyn. The war to end all wars claimed some 17 million lives.
The pandemic killed at least 50 million worldwide, about 675,000
in the United States, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention estimated in its 100th-year commemoration of the flu
pandemic.
For the daughter of ship’s pilot Salvatore Starace and Antonia
Esposito, “the grippe” was another indelible childhood memory.
New York City’s Health Department struggled to contain the
disease, quarantining stricken households and restricting public
gatherings.
My grandmother recounted bodies being put on ice inside
horse-drawn trucks as morgues filled up. Hospital staffs were
depleted by the flu, and my grandmother told of men who had been
medics in the Army pitching in.
Her maternal uncle, Alexander Esposito, who served with the U.S.
Army, was one of them. “Uncle Allie volunteered to help at the
hospital because he had some medical training,” she told me.
“Mamma was worried that he would get the flu and die.”
In Brooklyn alone in 1918, 4,514 people died from influenza from
a population of 1,798,513, according to almanacs published in
1918 and 1920 by the Brooklyn Daily Eagle newspaper.
Until she died in 1996, whenever my grandmother saw me going out
with an open coat, she warned: “Button up or you’ll get the
grippe.”
By many written and photographic accounts New York City threw
caution to the wind on Armistice Day.
“I never saw anything like that day,” she told me.
(Reporting by Toni Reinhold; Editing by Clive McKeef)
[© 2018 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.] Copyright 2018 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Thompson Reuters is solely responsible for this content.
|
|
