Back When the Flu Was All You Had to Worry About

Fifty years ago, there was an outbreak of flu across the country. 

As the article above from the Dec. 30, 1971 Journal notes, lt was “probably a variety of the Hong Kong flu which reached epidemic proportions across the country three years ago, but this strain of the flu is not as serious.” 

Boy, I never thought I’d be nostalgic about the days when the worst that could happen to us was a case of the flu. And back then, flu symptoms were unmistakable: fever (over a hundred), nausea, vomiting and diarrhea. The flu kept us in bed and home from school for a few days, and we drank a lot of seven up (or ginger ale), and ate a lot of soup, but we knew we would get over it eventually.

In the last twenty or thirty years or so, the flu of my youth seemed to have gone away. Is it because of the flu shots? I don’t know.

As an adult, I would still get sick, but could never really find out what it was I had. The classic flu symptoms were never all there; you just knew you felt lousy. If you did bother to contact a doctor, the diagnosis was usually that we had some “unknown virus,” and that it would go away in a few weeks. 

Now we have a named virus that’s still killing people that doesn’t seem like it’s ever going away.

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Back here, I took a humorous look at getting sick, back when my siblings and I were kids in the 1960s.