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Facing an epidemic

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COURTESY OF DAN ESKENAZI THEN: Neighbors pose on the front steps of photographer Lawrence Lindsley's Wallingford home sometime in October 1918, when the city was closed down during the Spanish flu's devastating Seattle visit. The masks were required, although the law was rarely enforced. JEAN SHERRARD NOW: Wallingford neighbors repeat the 1918 flu shot behind masks pulled from one of the group's mask collection.

DAN ESKENAZI, Seattle photo collector and an old friend, shared with me these masked ladies posing with masked cats on the unlikely chance that I might know the porch. Penciled on the back of the little print is a caption: "Top row, Anna Kilgore, E.K. Barr, Ms. Anna S. Shaw. Lower row, Penelope and Tommy, Mrs. Shaw and Golly."

All the humans are wearing masks by order of the mayor. By the time the 1918 flu epidemic reached Seattle at the end of September, it had caused more deaths worldwide than World War I. When the rule about masks was lifted on Armistice Day, Nov. 11, the streets were quickly filled with bare-faced revelers. Still, Dr. T.D. Tuttle, state commissioner of health, warned that "people who have influenza are in the crowds that are celebrating victory. They will be in the street cars, in the theaters, in the stores." Tuttle also confessed, "the order had been more or less a farce."

Returning to the snapshot's caption, four of the five women are listed in the 1918 city directory living at 108 E. 43rd St. in Wallingford. Because that address is about 100 steps from my own, I was soon face-to-face with Eskenazi's unidentified porch, except that it was one house west of 108. This slight difference presented an opportunity. It hints, at least, of the photographer.

The house at 104 E. 43rd St. was built in 1918, the year that photographer Lawrence Denny Lindsley, the grandson of city founders David and Louisa Denny, moved in. Perhaps Lindsley took the shot of his neighbors sitting on his new front steps soon after he took possession with his bride, Pearl. Both Pearl and their only child, Abbie, died in 1920. Lindsley married again in 1944 and lived to be 104, into the 1970s.

Paul Dorpat specializes in historical photography and has published several books on early Seattle.