Over the weekend I visited my mom in St. Louis for a few days and while we were chatting she told me a story that I don’t recall ever having heard before which I thought I’d share. It helps if you know that my mom and her parents were in vaudeville. I’ve mentioned that a few times.
When my mom was six or seven she contracted scarlet fever. Now in those days before antibiotics scarlet fever, today considered a mild ailment, was a serious potentially life-threatening disease. You may recall that Beth in Little Women contracted scarlet fever which progressed to rheumatic fever and she died. There wasn’t much that doctors could do about it then except wait out the course of the disease. When my mom was a kid people who contracted scarlet fever were required to go to the isolation hospital to avoid giving the disease to other people.
So my grandparents took my mom, unconscious, to the isolation hospital on the streetcar.
For the first few days my mom was kept in a glass-enclosed room alone but after a while, presumably after she wasn’t contagious any more, she was placed in a ward with other kids to recover. There really wasn’t a great deal to do there and pretty soon my mom began to get out of bed and perform every vaudeville routine she knew. I’m not sure whether that was more like Shirley Temple’s On the Good Ship Lollipop or Margaret O’Brien’s performance in Meet Me in St. Louis (I was drunk last night, dear Mother, etc.). Probably a little of both.
It wasn’t long before the hospital authorities had had enough of that and sent her home.
