Wheat and Light

"[T]he white loaf may return to its own," the News rejoiced, for the wheatless way of life was over. Two days after the war's end, the federal food administration suspended its wheat-conservation rules requiring the use of wheat substitutes in baking — but asked that patriotic Americans continue to use wheat sparingly. There were still armies to feed, as well as civilians in the war-torn regions of Europe.

Indiana's federal fuel administrator had been even quicker to say, "Let there be light!" The very day of the armistice, Evans Woollen sent telegrams to all of Indiana's county fuel administrators to let them know that lightless nights were a thing of the past.

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The day of the armistice, Edward Yager, fresh from the fields of his parents' farm southeast of Ainsworth, had boarded a train at Crown Point bound for an army camp somewhere in the southern U.S., where he would be transformed from farmer to warrior. He got as far as Logansport, Indiana, when he was intercepted by a telegram. We don't know who sent it, or exactly what it said, but its substance was: "Never mind!" The war was over, Ed was free to come home. His first day as a soldier was also his last.

On November 12, George and Agnes Severance received a letter dated October 21 from their flyboy, George Jr., now in France. He told them that he had been injured yet again, back on August 27 — how, he didn't say. The army had not reported that fact to his parents at George Jr.'s own request; he didn't want to trouble them. But within a few weeks he had recovered sufficiently to write his own letter, telling his folks at once that he had been wounded, and that there was nothing to worry about.

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Back in Hobart, Dr. Clara Faulkner had something to worry about. She, along with other health officials throughout the state, had felt safe in lifting the general quarantine early in November, as the influenza epidemic abated. But around the time of the armistice, she began to see an increase in new cases.

They were not necessarily fatal, as Hobart and surrounding areas seemed to have been spared the worst of what this strain of influenza could do. It could and did run through whole families: just recently August and Bertha Mueller and their five young children had all been down with the influenza, but now they were recovering, and August was even back at work; the same had happened to the family of Edward and Margaret Keilman, with eight children, all of them now recuperating. Just lately Eugene and Carrie Chandler and their two young daughters had fallen ill.

But in Hobart as elsewhere, this flu, when fatal, had an unnerving predilection for people in the prime of life. Two relatively young men had just been laid to rest in Crown Hill Cemetery, both victims of complications of influenza. Clement Griffin, a 34-year-old conductor on the Hobart streetcar line, had died November 8; John K.F. Johnson, 33 years old, had died in Chicago and been brought home for burial. Both men left wives too sick with influenza to attend their husbands' funerals.

For the moment Dr. Faulkner could only stay on the watch against a resurgence of the epidemic, as she considered the economic and social consequences of another quarantine, and the desirability of imposing new restrictions on these newly unrestricted people.


Sources:
♦ 1920 Census.
♦ "Clement Griffin, Street Car Conductor, Dies of Influenza." Hobart News 14 Nov. 1918.
♦ "Deaths." Hobart Gazette 15 Nov. 1918.
♦ "Indiana Fuel Administrator Calls Off Lightless Nights Edict." Hobart News 14 Nov. 1918.
♦ "Local and Personal." Hobart News 14 Nov. 1918.
♦ "Local Drifts." Hobart Gazette 15 Nov. 1918.
♦ "Wheat Rules Are Suspending by the Food Bureau on Tuesday." Hobart News 14 Nov. 1918.