8 minute read
History Lesson
MUSKIE ARCHIVES AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS LIBRARY
Members of the Student Army Training Corps go through drills on a cold 1918 day behind Hathorn Hall. The old wood-frame gym is at left; Roger Williams is in the distance at right. The Best Preventive
A century ago, quarantines, distancing, and washing up were key to beating infectious bugs at Bates
by h. jay burns
in april of this year, a surge of COVID-19 cases among students prompted Bates to implement a campus-wide quarantine.
Students were restricted to their residences, except to pick up meals at Commons or go outside, physically distanced, for fresh air and exercise.
It was the first (and last, we hope) quarantine of the pandemic at Bates — and the first in nearly a century.
During three quarantine episodes in the early 1900s, measures included such extremes as sleeping with dormitory windows wide open as the “fury” of cleansing October winds whipped through and one dramatic recapture of a student who fled quarantine and made it all the way to Portsmouth.
1907
Some Outside Institution Whittier House and Cheney House went into quarantine in November 1907 for a time due to diphtheria, a bacterial illness now largely eliminated thanks to vaccines. The illness was “brought in by some outside institution,” the Student believed.
In April of that year, a room in Parker Hall was quarantined after one of its residents became ill.
The college credited its excellent drainage and sewage system with stopping the spread, though diphtheria is more of an airborne disease spread person-to-person by respiratory droplets.
1918
Avoidance of Crowds The global 1918–19 influenza pandemic, which killed around 675,000 Americans and many millions worldwide, came in three waves, the deadliest being the second, in fall 1918.
The Bates Student, in its debut issue of the academic year, on Oct. 18, 1918, reported the recent deaths of five alumni, four of them in the military. In Maine, more than 2,500 people died in October 1918 alone. That month in Lewiston, most businesses and gathering places were shut down. (Lewiston’s Catholic churches, meanwhile, held indoor services, against the city’s Board of Health advice.)
The Bates campus was in quarantine for most of October. Even so, the flu hit hard. “On the first Friday of the year, a case of influenza appeared. For
weeks thereafter every energy was bent to securing proper care for the sick,” said President George Colby Chase in his 1918–19 president’s report.
Frye House and the top floor of Rand Hall, a women’s residence at the time, were turned over to the sick.
Most of the cases, about 40, were among female students. The gender disparity was likely due to the fact that residences and most activities were single-sex in those days. And, in 1918, the men’s side of campus was largely taken over by the Student Army Training Corps, similar to today’s ROTC. About 150 male students, or about a third of the total student body, were SATC trainees, and they lived life under strict Army command — and heightened protocols.
Case in point: During the quarantine, chapel services for the men, presumably including those of SATC, were held outside, “in the open” in front of Parker Hall, rather than in the Chapel. The women had their services in the Chapel “as usual.”
Wary of the pandemic, Bates postponed its January reopening for the winter semester for two weeks. (Bates did something similar this year, extending winter break by nearly a month.)
For the SATC soldiers, Parker was one of their “barracks.” The Student exhorted students to follow “rules laid down by the authorities and keep the barracks free from disease.” The rules sound a lot like today’s protocols: “avoidance of crowds and careful cleansing — these are the best preventive that we have."
In the Parker barracks, windows remained open all night. A student recalled a cold and windy morning with the windows “wide open, so that the above mentioned wind can sweep through the rooms in all its fury and thus keep colds and other ills away.” (In February 2021, the CDC recommended the same thing to prevent the spread of COVID in schools and daycares: Open the windows!)
When the quarantine was lifted, in late October, two popular hangouts for students, the Quality Shop and the George Ross ice cream shop, “had a sudden boom in trade.” “The Qual” was at 145 College St., now home to Lewiston Variety, while George Ross, Class of 1904, ran the famed ice cream parlor just west of campus on Elm Street.
“The quarantine has worked hardships on civilians and soldiers alike but results have been obtained,” the Student reported.
1923
At a Standstill
In 1923, a college-wide quarantine due to scarlet fever lasted Feb. 3–26.
“College activities at a standstill,” headlined the Student, noting postponement of Winter Carnival as well as exams.
Students were restricted to their residences; faculty and staff were told to stay home — no Zoom in those days.
Several students tried to beat the quarantine by leaving for home. They didn’t get far. One was detained in Portsmouth, N.H., and put into solitary quarantine there for seven days. “It is only to ward off a possible epidemic that the radical measures have been pursued,” the Student promised.
In the spirit of keeping the presses rolling, the campus newspaper went to great lengths to publish its Feb. 9 edition, sending copy to the local printer by telephone and postal mail, even though, at the time, the students were not permitted to send letters home, lest their mail carry the fevercausing strep bacteria far and wide.
The editors promised that they did not violate the “safe and sane regulations” that had been imposed during the quarantine. “All copy, before passing through the mail, has been fumigated.” n
When the 1918 campus quarantine was lifted, students flocked to their favorite off-campus spots, including the ice cream parlor run by George Ross, Class of 1904 (below), on Elm Street.
MUSKIE ARCHIVES AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS LIBRARY Spring 2021
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Bearded Friend
archives
hirsute pursuits in the muskie archives and special collections library
Throughout the late 19th century, nearly all Bates professors (who were all men) as well as most male students had facial hair — from walrus mustaches to mutton-chop sideburns. Thomas James Bollin, Class of 1879, wears “friendly” mutton chops, distinguished from typical mutton chops by how the sideburns meet the mustache. Bollin once described social equality as the “brotherhood of man in every condition,” which 2014 Commencement speaker Isabel Wilkerson called a “beautiful definition.”
The Goat
Edmund Randall Angell, Class of 1873, sports a full goatee. A chemist who worked in his own New Hampshire lab, he patented a snowblowertype contraption that removed ice from sidewalks with rapidly rotating metal teeth.
He is the Walrus
Sporting a walrus mustache is Frank Hartford Smith, Class of 1873. Smith was a lawyer in Stockton, Calif.
It’s Curtains
Getting a Handle
Philosophy and theology professor Benjamin Francis Hayes, circa 1872, wears a chin curtain beard, also known as a Shenandoah.
Irish-born Thomas Singer, Class of 1890, had one of the longest handlebar mustaches at Bates in the hairraising 1800s. Singer died while at divinity school at Yale in 1894.
Seeking an emotional and visual boost at the end of a difficult year, I headed to Main Street on New Year’s Eve to photograph artist Charlie Hewitt’s 30-foot Hopeful sign, brightly lit on an exterior brick wall of Bates Mill No. 5 and framed by holiday lights. Finding hope allowed me to sidestep the hurdles of cynicism and despair; abandoning hopelessness vaulted me into the land of common cause. Hopeful. — Phyllis Graber Jensen
Bates Magazine Spring 2021
Editor H. Jay Burns
Designer Mervil Paylor Design
Production Manager Grace Kendall
Director of Photography Phyllis Graber Jensen
Photographer Theophil Syslo
Class Notes Editor Doug Hubley
Contributing Editor Mary Pols President of Bates A. Clayton Spencer
Chief Communications Officer Sean Findlen ’99
Bates Magazine Advisory Board Marjorie Patterson Cochran ’90 Geraldine FitzGerald ’75 David Foster ’77 Joe Gromelski ’74 Judson Hale Jr. ’82 Jonathan Hall ’83 Christine Johnson ’90 Jon Marcus ’82 Peter Moore ’78
Contact Us Bates Communications 2 Andrews Rd. Lewiston ME 04240 magazine@bates.edu 207-786-6330 Production Bates Magazine is published twice annually at family-owned Penmor Lithographers, just a few minutes from campus. We use paper created with 30 percent postconsumer fiber and print with inks that are 99.5 percent free of volatile compounds.
On the Cover Presenting a visual meta- phor for the 2020–21 pandemic year at Bates — constant flux, constant adjustment — Ben Hof- finger ’22 gives his jug- gling clubs a workout near Lake Andrews. “Juggling relieves stress and helps to clear my head,” he says. (Amen to that.) See feature story beginning on page 44. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen. Nondiscrimination Bates College prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, national or ethnic origin, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression, age, disability, genetic information or veteran status and other legally protected statuses in the recruitment and admission of its students, in the administration of its education policies and programs, or in the recruitment of its faculty and staff. The college adheres to all applicable state and federal equal opportunity laws and regulations. Full policy: bates.edu/nondiscrimination
