BREMERTON — Writing a letter to her parents, young Margaret Mary Fitzpatrick described the outbreak in calamitous terms. "The influenza is raging pretty bad here," said Fitzpatrick, just 19 and among the first women in the Navy. "...The movies, barber ships, churches, etc., are closed in Bremerton."

Fitzpatrick, stationed at Puget Sound Naval Hospital, noted 46 deaths here in October 1918, the darkest days of Spanish Influenza. The pandemic would eventually kill somewhere between 50-100 million people worldwide, including an estimated 675,000 Americans.

As our world confronts a new and different pandemic, the one 102 years ago offers various lessons on what worked, and what didn't, in quelling the wave of illness and death. An anti-spitting law was passed. The government ordered cloth masks to be worn in public, giving rise to the expression “In Gauze we Trust.” But news of the outbreak was slow and sometimes nonexistent, thanks to a federal sedition act passed the same year by Congress that made it a crime to say anything negative about the war effort. (It was known as the Spanish flu because Spain, neutral during what was once called the "Great War," allowed for articles about it to be published.)

Today, area schools have announced more than month-long closures, even while Bremerton, then as now, is home to critical national defense manpower and infrastructure that must be maintained at all costs and ready at all times.

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Fitzpatrick, for her part, was among a new generation of "Yeomanettes," women who joined the shipyard to help in the battle and defeat of the Central Powers during World War I. They found an additional calling in caring for flu victims. The 19-year-old, who had joined on a whim, became the Navy's woman first chief petty officer and served as aide to the commander of the Puget Sound Naval Hospital, according to Lettie Gavin's book, "They Also Served: American Women in World War I."

The flu's intensity gathered here in September 1918. Seattle’s second Commissioner of Health, Dr. J. S. McBride, had a plan: “In the event the disease appears here, and it is not unlikely that it will, we will endeavor to isolate the first cases and thus try to prevent it becoming epidemic," he wrote, according to The Influenza Encyclopedia.

Flu masks were ordered to be worn. "Individual voluntary quarantine" was at first encouraged, then mandated. When those unwitting — or perhaps just disobeying — attempted to go to pool halls or other Seattle attractions, the police responded with an "influenza squad" to lay down the law.

Across the water in Kitsap, more than 70 deaths were reported within the ranks of the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard alone in the fall of 1918 and into winter of 1919, though official tallies varied. Some of the obituaries at the time failed to mention flu was the cause, but the deaths seemed suspicious, according to Fredi Perry’s book, “Bremerton and Puget Sound Navy Yard.”

There were tent cities along the waterfront and in Charleston, the latter of which had one with 16 cases of the flu inside. Service members started saying, "When we opened the tent flap, in flu enza, out flew liberty," author Gavin wrote.

The first victim of the flu, Michael Benbennick, Jr., was a local contractor; his wife became the first patient at the hospital on Chester Avenue, Perry’s book said.

When military personnel died, a procession would take their body to the H.B. Kennedy, a steamer ferry that would transport remains to Seattle, according to resident Sarah (Attridge) Newland.

By Nov. 6, 1918, newspapers vowed the epidemic had passed while simultaneously reporting that residents had to wear masks. In reality, it would rage another year.

The flu would overwhelm the existing hospital space. A nurse named Angie Webber Harrison was volunteering to care for patients at the old First Methodist Church. Her husband, Benjamin, helped open the city's first non-naval hospital that same year, becoming a part of its board and buying stock in it, according to Perry's book.

Thus, the flu pandemic also led to the establishment of a permanent civilian hospital in Kitsap County, one named for the couple, that exists to this day. The Harrisons, buried at Ivy Green Cemetary in West Bremerton, bequeathed their estate to the organization to help keep it going.

"It is my desire that Harrison Memorial Hospital shall serve humanity and shall alleviate the pain and suffering of mankind," Benjamin wrote in his will.

Today, Harrison's nurses, doctors and personnel are once again serving as Kitsap's critical hospital for the pandemic. Imogene Wilson, a retired longtime Harrison nurse who worked at its East Bremerton location not long after it opened in 1965, said she might not have witnessed a pandemic while there. But she believes they can handle it.

"That's what they're trained to do," said Wilson, now 97 and living in assisted care at her home in East Bremerton. "They're trained to rise above."

Indeed, there is reason for optimism as Kitsap, and the world, battle this new pandemic. The world has made great scientific strides in the century since, according to Jeremy Brown, an emergency physician and the author of "Influenza: The Hundred-Year Hunt to Cure the Deadliest Disease in History." The advent of antibiotics, advances in treatments and the actual discovery of viruses all occurred after the Spanish flu.

Fitzgerald, the teen who would become the Navy's first chief petty officer, would ultimately look back fondly on her time in the service and in Bremerton, according to Gavin's book. "It was such an honor to be one of the first women in the Navy," she said in an interview before her death at 85. "It was a beautiful part of my life."