Gaitha Butterfield remembers she cried when her brother stole her mask.
It wasn't a Halloween mask, but the flu mask that folks were required to wear during the 1918 pandemic.
Butterfield, who was 6, was going to the store with her younger brother. Her mother used to send them there with eggs, which they traded for groceries -- "and an extra egg to get a piece of candy."
"(My brother) wanted to go so he ran and grabbed my mask and I had to go home crying because he had my mask," says Butterfield, 97, of Pleasant View.
Butterfield, who lived in Escalante in 1918, says no one in her family of 10 children got sick. But she remembers the illness striking others in her community.
"We kind of stood in awe if we knew someone had the flu," she says. "It was on our mind."
These days, Butterfield gets her flu shots and says she's noticed people wearing masks again. But she hasn't put one on -- "At my age I don't worry about it," the school volunteer says.
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When the flu struck in Ogden, Lorell Hobbs Widdison didn't get sick, but her mother, father, a sister and a brother were all ill.
Since Widdison, then 5, and her younger brother were both well, they slept together in a crib in their parents' room.
At school, Widdison remembers her teacher warning the class that no one should sleep in the same room as people who were sick.
"I didn't dare tell her because I knew there was no place else to sleep," she says, adding, "What else could you do?"
Widdison, now 95 and a Hooper resident, also recalls that a teenage aunt came in to help take care of her family.
"She chased me all over the house trying to give me castor oil to keep me well," Widdison says.
Her family recovered, although Widdison says her mother was thin as a rail for a long time. "It took her several years to gain back her pep and energy."
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Ninety-year-old Aleen Jones just missed the Spanish Flu epidemic but the disease changed her parents' wedding plans.
George and Ethel Hunt were married at the bride's home in Hooper on Jan. 16, 1919, with only immediate family present.
"They had to have a small wedding at home. They couldn't have any kind of reception or anything," says Jones, of Hooper, who was born Nov. 15, 1919.
Friends wanted to give the newlyweds a chivaree, but that wasn't possible either, she says.
Jones says her late husband, Arch Jones, was in sixth grade when the flu hit and had just taken time off school to help on the family farm with the beet harvest. After he'd been back in school about a week, classes were called off due to the disease.
After the schools finally reopened, "his father said, 'you missed so much school there's no point in you going back,'ââââ" Jones says -- so young Arch missed the rest of that school year.
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