Life is tough.
Once upon a time, not so long ago, life was even tougher... harder!

Sickness was not just accepted as an everyday part of life. It was an everyday part of life!

When my mother was growing up, there were few people who were really healthy; but, almost every family had a sickly one who was somehow always a lot sicker than the others.

In her family, my mother was "the sickly one."

Her sister, Nellie, had only a partial palate in the top of her mouth; but, it never seemed to bother her much. Their brother, James, was not all there; and, had to be watched. But, it was my mother who was chronically underweight and sick all the time, especially every summer.

It was malaria!

Every summer she would lie on the porch, weak and faint from malaria.
Every summer she dreaded because she knew what that summer would bring. About the time she entered adolescence was also about the time her family moved to Eastport, here in Jacksonville, and left the mosquito infested swamps behind.

Also left behind seems to have been the malaria. It never bothered her again; but, she was never really strong and always seemed to be sick in one way or another. Still she managed to live to be 85 years old.

The drawing on this page was done by her great grandson, Chad, from a photograph taken when she was 83 years old.

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When she was growing up almost everyone used tobacco in one way or another. Most often it was snuff. This was a time when spittoons and chamberpots were fixtures in just about every household; even poor ones, especially poor ones since they were the last to have indoor plumbing. Pipes and cigars were widely used too; but, cigarettes did not really come into wide use until after World War One. Many people at the time believed that tobacco was healthy and had curative properties. For instance, they would attempt to cure an earache by blowing smoke in the ear.

My mother did not start smoking until she was 25 when my father started going over to her brother, Nelson's, house to listen to the radio. She went with him. Back then, it would never occur to a woman to say "You go on Dear. I had just as soon stay home." Not if he wanted her to go! Every saturday my father along with Nelson and Nelson's wife, Della, would gather around the radio long into the night and listen to the "Grand Ol' Opry." The whole deal was rather trying to my mother who had nothing against country music, but a whole lot against just sitting and starring at a radio. She began to look for something to do and eventually tried some of Nelson's cigarettes. Soon she was buying her own cigarettes; and she smoked for the rest of her life; but, she was never more than a pack a day smoker if that. A half a pack would be more like it. Still, it still did not do her health any good; and, in her later years she had emphysema, although not a bad case.

My father smoked cigars until 1975 when he gave them up; and, never seems to have suffered any ill effects from them. Of his battles with polio and post polio syndrome, I have written on
another page.

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Volunteers made soup and went around from house to house. If you wanted some soup, you would leave a pot outside for them to pour it in. They would pour the soup in without ever touching the pot. Then when they were gone, whoever felt able that day would go get the soup. It was mostly just a thin broth with a few vegetables; but, it helped her and a lot of people get though the epidemic.

A while later her mother caught typhoid!, was taken to a hospital in Jacksonville; and, came close to dying; but, she finally came out of it and lived for several more decades.

While her mother was in the hospital, a family who had moved next door recently from the Bahamas came down with smallpox! The family was quarantined and everyone in the neighborhood of Eastport, Florida was vaccinated, my mother included.

The vaccination made her very ill and she fell off the porch, busting the little vaccination pustule on her arm wide open. It left a much worse scar on her left arm than a smallpox vaccination usually does. All in the smallpox infected neighbors did survive; but, several were badly scarred.

No else one in Eastport came down with smallpox.