I’m not sure exactly how I came to have a 1917 Formoso High School annual in my personal library, but it does make an interesting point of comparison with the only other Formoso yearbook I’ve seen lately, a school annual published forty years later.
The population of the little Kansas town where I grew up was about two-hundred when I started school in the 1957-58 school year. The entire senior class then consisted of a single pupil, and the High School play that spring, which required all hands on deck, was a simple Western farce performed in what is now the town’s roller-skating rink.
Twice as many people lived within the city limits of Formoso back in 1917, with many more families occupying small farms in the surrounding countryside. Having between sixty and seventy students enrolled in Formoso High School enabled the music department to stage Bubul, a comic operetta in two acts, written in 1911.
There are eight major roles in Bulbul, with another twenty singers needed for minor parts and a chorus of ladies-in-waiting. The student body was sufficient to fill all of these openings as well as supplying a twelve-piece orchestra, with enough left over to act as stagehands, ushers, and ticket-takers.
The plot of the operetta involves tricking stubborn Princess Bulbul into an arranged marriage by having a visiting young Prince Caspian dress as a peddler and bump iinto her “accidentally” by moonlight. Yup, that’s about all there is to it.
After a bit of opening banter with his courtiers, a Persian monarch marches front and center and introduces himself to the audience with a few lines of song.
Iamet:
A mild mannered monarch am I
To rule without anger I try.
And am happy to say that under my sway
The land is at peace and so likely to stay.
I can’t read that lyric without imagining it being sung by Jonathan Groff in the guise of King George from Hamilton. I hope local boy Edward Blakely was able to conjure some of the same effect with his Persian Iamet.
Anyway, the costumes for Bulbul were showy, the melodies bouncy, the lyrics clean and simple, and all in all it was probably more fun to be in than to behold. After two nights of performances $124.00 was raised for some good cause, although the local paper opined that the box office would have been much better if a more spacious venue had been available.
The 1917 annual included a few names that I recognized, but most of them were from the section giving an update on previous graduates. Homer Paton, later my comrade at ceremonies honoring the fallen who were buried in local cemeteries, had enrolled at Kansas Wesleyan. Frank Kissinger, a man I later knew as an insurance agent who had been getting about in a wheelchair since his youth, was winning high honors at Washburn College, and James Marr, a 1914 Formoso graduate, was about to enter his final year at KU.
Returning to Formoso after completing his studies the following year, Marr would serve very briefly as Assistant Cashier at the First National Bank before America threw itself into the Great War engulfing Western Europe. Marr’s service in the crusade would be soberingly brief. Like thousands of young men called up for duty in France, James would not leave American shores. An item in the Oct. 11, 1918 edition of The Jewell County Monitor gave an update:
Among the soldier boys who have been shipped home for burial are: Alvah Byers, Verne Hancock, Fred Angel, James Marr, Clyde Winter, Bert Lacy all having died from pneumonia at the camps.
Both Alvah Byers and Fred Angle were from the town of Jewell, Bert Lacey lived at Beloit in nearby Mitchell County, and Clyde Winter was from Webber. Verner Hancock may have had some local connection, although he had been born in Kentucky, lived in Illinois, and would be buried in Oklahoma.
What is remembered as the “Spanish Flu” (even if ground-zero may have been Kansas) was especially lethal for young people with robust immune systems. After James Marr was inducted into the Army at Fort Riley on August 27, he was immediately sent to Camp Devens, near Boston, Massachusetts, where he died on October 6.
Fifty-thousand recruits had been packed into Camp Devens, where an ailment which at first appeared to be an ordinary strain of influenza, quickly progressed to a case of pneumonia that was generally fatal. At the height of the outbreak at Camp Devens, a hundred soldiers perished every day. The staff of doctors at the camp was increased from 25 to 250, to no avail. Estimates now put the death toll in Camp Devens alone, at between 750 and 1000.
While digging into the story of Marr and his family, I came upon a group portrait on familysearch.org taken shortly before James Marr reported for duty. In addition to James’s tragically early death in 1918, his sister Elsie, aged 13 in the photo, would die at 17 of a heart ailment in 1922.
I also ran across a letter from one of the doctors at Camp Devens who was struggling to keep his young patients alive, written to a colleague to explain the horror they were completely at a loss to contain.
Two hours after admission they have the mahogany spots over the cheek bones, and a few hours later you can begin to see the cyanosis extending from their ears and spreading all over the face, until it is hard to distinguish the coloured men from the white. It is only a matter of a few hours then until death comes, and it is simply a struggle for air until they suffocate. It is horrible. One can stand it to see one, two or twenty men die, but to see these poor devils dropping like flies sort of gets on your nerves.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/influenza-letter/