William L. Stephens was superintendent of schools when the pandemic of 1918-19 struck. Photo courtesy of Long Beach Unified School District. Editor’s note: “Old News” is an occasional series looking at some of Long Beach’s quirky and interesting historical stories and headlines. Pandemics are disasters enough before you throw schools into the mix. Then, all hell breaks loose. It’s a perilous vacation for kids, who tend to be happier taking their chances with the outbreak rather than with a day of mind-numbing schoolwork, and it’s a time of terror for the parents who now have to add to their daily jobs and housework a career in teaching at home. It’s bad today, as the current pandemic has gobbled up much of spring and all of summer and is now gnawing its way through fall with no sign of stopping when winter comes. But COVID-19, for all the trouble it’s caused and continues to cause, remains far behind the devastation of the 1918-19 H1N1 pandemic, or Spanish Influenza, which struck fast and hard, killing at least 50 million worldwide and about 675,000 in the U.S. About one-third of the world’s population—around 500 million—contracted the virus. The rapidity of the Spanish […]
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