Author: kerbey

Countdown To May Day

TSCW 1949

Perhaps your state will start re-opening as per its Phase I guidelines on May 1st. Perhaps it’s May 8th. All I know is it WILL be May, and folks will be getting prepped and ready to shine.

Betty can breathe on Martha, and Martha can cough on Mary.

1950 Cactus

Carl won’t have to wipe down that wooden chair seat after he gets up.

The line at Great Clips will stretch past the adjacent Subway and Pizza Hut in the strip malls.

Yucca 47

The cleaners will be packed with piles of people’s threadbare sweats and yoga pants.

Cobblers will be cobbling.

Diners will be packed elbow-to-elbow.

People might even board public transportation.

Ew. Seriously gross. Kirk is even having second thoughts about cushions never cleaned.

Butchers will be butchering, fileting, de-boning, and slicing deli meats and cheeses.

Department store racks will be scoured for wider waistbands.

Bars and restaurants, clubs and dance halls will throw open their doors and welcome the traumatized masses, stumbling in to relearn dances, to rebuild their tolerance to cocktails, and use public restrooms.

The streets will sound with joyous rapture and merry harmony. “So long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen, goodbye” to coronavirus.

At least…for now.

All The King’s Horses And All The King’s Men Couldn’t Put The Economy Back Together Again

Houston Chronicle

Looking at this image of debris washed up along Galveston’s seawall as Hurricane Carla battered the coastline in September of 1961 made me reflect on the powerful beating our economy has taken in a period of only five weeks. Yesterday, my childhood restaurant closed, one where I have fond memories of eating gingerbread pancakes and broccoli sour cream omelets, washed down with iced hibiscus tea at the dawn of the 80s. It had an hour wait nearly every weekend for 40 years, and now it has no wait. Another trendy Austin hotspot folded this morning. So much for their lemon shrimp linguine. How can everything tumble so quickly?

photo by Flip Schulke

Our favorite haunts are pummeled, as we stand helplessly by. So much for the Pleasure Pier.

all images from the Houston Chronicle

The water keeps rising. The Mobil is inoperable, but we don’t need the gas because we can’t go anywhere. The Motor Hotel is flooded, but we’re not allowed to travel from home, so it barely registers.

Down is up, and up is down. Small businesses fold; delivery services soar. Horses stand on patios.

Boats prop tilted on the highway.

In the aftermath, we try to salvage what we can. Sift through the rubble.

What do we do now? We have no income. We have no idea if our jobs will exist when we return to them. How will we pay our bills? We don’t qualify for unemployment benefits. This stimulus check will barely get us through the next month on essentials.

So we cry and comfort each other.

We wonder if the lives saved by isolation outnumbers the lives lost by suicide, outnumbers the families left unfed and unsheltered, down to their last double digits in their savings accounts. And still it goes on.

But we can see the light. We can walk toward it. The world will once again re-open, battered and bruised, but hopefully more united, more focused on true priorities and aware of invisible dangers. Together, we will wade out.

Boxes And Boxes Of Babies

all images from “Houston 175”

Today we continue in our appreciation for the medical field, who has been streeeeetched to their limits during these past several weeks, and will probably all be suffering from PTSD for the rest of their lives. But back in July of 1970, high-haired Connie Wharton and Jean Davis were keeping it casual and lowkey while lifting newborns out of stork/kitten/kangaroo boxes at Jefferson Davis Hospital, the first publicly-owned Houston hospital to accept low-income patients.

Fun fact Friday: the hospital was largely abandoned in the 80s, thought to be full of ghosts, named a city landmark, and then destroyed renovated into artist lofts for the rich and crafty. Plus, everyone knows buildings cannot be named after a former president of the Confederate States; we’re too busy erasing history to make everything PC.

This next image shows nurses and patients at Houston’s St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in the Fifth Ward in March of 1959. Nobody likes to be barefoot, donning a hospital gown, but some encouragement, attention, and a fire truck can go a long way toward healing.

Our final Houston-based medical subject is Dr. Katharine Hsu, a pediatric doctor who came to America from China in 1948. She served as Chief Resident Physician in Pediatrics at the Children’s Hospital in Shanghai, but when the Japanese invaded the city in l94l, she fled through enemy lines and joined her husband at Chung Cheng Medical College as Head of Pediatrics. Here she takes vitals of a shirtless youngster in July of 1953 at–you guessed it–Jefferson Davis Hospital.

Fun Fact Friday: After tuberculosis took the lives of her brother and sister, she made it her goal to stop the spread. She established a one-room, one-nurse pediatric TB facility which later expanded into the Children’s TB Clinic and Hospital, where she worked from 1953 to 1969.

Per her obituary in 2007, she died at the age of 93.

When the use of the drug Isoniazid proved beneficial in treating TB patients, Katharine envisioned using it as a preventive against the disease. Since her extensive testing and studies proved overwhelmingly successful, the preventive treatment was adopted worldwide…The International Biographical Center of Cambridge named her International Woman of the Year in l996-l997 for her contributions to medicine, research, and education.

Today we salute the men and women in past and present medical fields, doing their best to keep the rest of us alive, with all the skills to treat and diagnose when we are helpless and vulnerable.

Cremona, Italy ICU 3/13/20 by Paolo Miranda

Why I Don’t Have Polio

Houston Chronicle

Henry L. Hohl Elementary, April 1955: The first Houston-area students await the newly available Salk vaccine.

Needles aren’t fun, but they’re even less fun while wearing formalwear, like this group below.

Fox Photos/Getty Images

 

Houston Chronicle Archives, 1961

Just like little Casey Carl Vaughn above, I, too, received an injection of the vaccine as a youngster. I imagine that’s also why you don’t have polio. Unless you do.

Below you’ll see a free clinic offered by the Houston health department in May of 1961. Residents lined up at the Minimax Store, where volunteers doled out 50,000 inoculations in one week. Ain’t nobody got time for paralysis.

Houston 175

Albert Sabin provided a cheaper alternative to Salk’s vaccine, by adding drops of vaccine to sugar cubes. No injection necessary.

https://www.historyofvaccines.org/

This Houston nurse followed suit in 1962, adding drops of vaccine to sugar cubes.

Houston 175

But it was too little, too late for these polio-afflicted children in Philadelphia, shown way back in 1950 at a meeting with the chairman of the city’s March of Dimes organization. (Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries). Sometimes timing is everything.

 

One Month Down, One More To Go

Today makes a full four weeks of quarantine for us.

It’s the first Sunday in 13 years that I haven’t sung during the Easter service.

We miss going to the Strand and chatting up high-risk seniors on park benches.

“Your Town & Mine” by Eleanor Thomas

I haven’t filled my gas tank since Friday the 13th of last month, the last day of school, and our last orthodontist visit for the foreseeable future.

No Ross, no Lowe’s, no Hobby Lobby. We can’t even drop off used items to Goodwill.

And how we miss our restaurants! Will our favorite server, Victor, still have a job?

Who will keep our iced tea full come summer?

Meanwhile, kids are hating self-quarantine and distance learning.

They’d rather be at school, texting friends and ignoring their teachers, eating lunch off poorly-cleaned cafeteria tables and discussing lucrative employment opportunities in the 2020’s. Add cyberhacker to that list, boys–and marginal girls!

We long for the days of popping into the grocery store quickly, without 20 minutes of pre-planning, gloves, masks, sanitizer pump, and a towel to protect our car seats from the questionably COVID-covered grocery bags.

Even a trip to the corner Walgreen’s requires the same preparation. Oh, for the days of running inside quickly for their 2 for $1 Arizona green tea specials!

I could be in and out in under 5 minutes!

No more sitting in goat-powered Radio Flyers, eating Drumsticks with chocolate nubs at the bottom of the cones, and spilling the neighborhood tea while the pharmacist informs Mom that the prescription for Vicodin is not legit because the doctor forgot to use the new watermarked paper for narcotics.

We’ve all been there, right? Those were the days.

Why, there probably won’t even be play dates until May at the earliest! No more construction paper tepees and happy little trees.

Yes, it’s certainly been challenging, all this self-isolation and quarantine.

But this shall yet pass, and soon we will gather on the plains for campfire grub again.

Life will begin to bear a semblance of normalcy, although never exactly the same.

Until then, don’t let it get your gander up! That is, your dander. Happy quarantining!

Darkness Doesn’t Win

I firmly believe that much good will arise from the aftermath of this challenging pandemic. Darkness endures for a season, but light always wins in the end.

As a visual, I offer two local images from yesterday:

One, from a very brief but harrowing storm with 80 mph winds, which caused this strike of lightning right beside a friend of mine’s home. (The rain quickly doused it.)

photo by Mike Culligan

And this image from another friend of the sunset view off her porch afterward.

image by Lauren Taylor

Beauty will come from the ashes, friends.

lovethispic.com

Five Minutes After Social Distancing Is Lifted

This image of busy cash registers at the Evanston, Illinois Conrad Hilton bar was taken nearly 63 years ago to the date: April 8, 1957.

April 8th was the kickoff dinner of the second annual Soph Week, with an evening of frolic and festivities for students attending the “Hi-Guy, Hello-Girl” dance, where Jimmy Palmer’s band played swinging tunes. Here’s hoping we’ll all be in good form at the end of this trial, ready to sip and socialize.

Sales Of Spirits Soar But My Soul Longs Only For Thee

As Newsweek reported when this month began:

U.S. ALCOHOL SALES INCREASE 55 PERCENT IN ONE WEEK AMID CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC

Yes. I get that. I’ve had a few pints. But it’s not the pints I’m jonesing for.

What I want is Coke. A frosty Coke and then a refill of frosty Coke immediately afterward.

Both of their bottles.

1959 LIFE

Don’t I deserve to be “really refreshed?”

Coke is everywhere. It taunts me in the pages of my magazines and from the walls of the antique stores. Is that Jane Wyman? I don’t know. All I want is her Coke.

I don’t need two liters of Coke. That’s too big, and it loses carbonation the second you open it up.

giphy.com

Then again, it can’t be too small.

Now this one is just right.