How wonderful it must be to be Donald Trump, to greet each new day utterly unencumbered by the accumulated knowledge of the past and behold the world with the wonder of a child.
Last month, back in the mists of time, Mr. Trump revealed his earth-shattering discovery that people die from the flu. Just last week, he lifted his dropped jaw and exclaimed that, “nobody’s ever seen” a pandemic like this.
We smile and cherish the boy’s innocent optimism, perhaps even envy the untroubled, perpetually-blank slate that is his mind.
Because, of course people have seen this. People like his father Fred, who, at 12 years old, had to join his mother in running the family business when his dad dropped dead of the flu in 1918. People like a not-too-distant neighbor of the future president.
In the spring of 1949, Louis Armstrong was on top of the world. The trumpeter had just gotten his picture on the cover of TIME, the first African-American to grace the magazine’s front. He traveled to his hometown to be feted as the King of the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club, the city’s most influential black social organization. When the Zulu parade rolled, fans mobbed his float, halting the parade and forcing the star to complete the run in a limo while they tore the float to pieces in search of souvenirs.
But Armstrong’s experience in New Orleans was bittersweet, as he witnessed just how extreme segregation had become in his home town. Before World War II, segregation had often been honored when, as recording legend Cosimo Matassa put it, officialdom was around, but widely ignored in the neighborhoods. When Armstrong visited in 49, however, it was being much more stringently enforced, and the discrimination he saw against blacks here was so appalling that he vowed never to return.
Instead, he spent his precious time off from being “America’s Jazz Ambassador” in his home in the Corona neighborhood of Queens, New York, about five miles from Jamaica Estates, where the grown Fred Trump lived with his family, including three-year-old Donald.
In his limited spare time, Armstrong was constantly writing. Journals, letters, an autobiography. Sometimes his ideas came too fast for paper and typewriter, and he made hours of tape recordings of his thoughts. All those papers and tapes are collected at Queens College, in the Armstong archive, which is managed by the Louis Armstrong House museum.
Corona is, today, under lockdown due to the virus of the same name, and the museum is currently closed to the public, though it remains active on social media. On Saturday, the museum posted a page of that autobiography containing Armstrong’s memories of the 1918 flu in New Orleans and the economic impact of closing down public gatherings.
(h/t to David Torkanowsky, who shared the museum’s post to friends.)
Our Museum, located in Corona, Queens—the epicenter of the outbreak of Covid-19 in New York—has now been closed for four weeks but we’re still finding ways to share precious gems from our Archives. This is a portion of Louis Armstrong’s typed manuscript for his autobiography “Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans” in which Louis writes about the impact of the Spanish flu pandemic on New Orleans in 1918. He writes,
“Anyway, just when the government was about to let the crowds congregate again, which would have given us a chance to play our horns again, they clamped down, tighter than ever before....That made me go back to working, from one job, to another....with everybody around me suffering with the Flu, I had to work and also play the part of a doctor to everyone in my family and friends of my neighborhood....which, if I had to say it myself, I did a good job in curing them.....”
Between September 8, 1918, and March 15, 1919, there were 3,362 influenza-related deaths in New Orleans. Louis Armstrong was 17 years old. Stay safe, friends.
Plus ça change.
Update:
For more on les affaires de La Nouvelle-Orléans, here’s the fourth installment of "When Care Remembered: New Orleans in the Time of Covid-19". Apologies for the rough edges. Corralling the audio, video and writing solo in a week’s a bit time-consuming, and I can’t dress ‘em up as nicely as I’d like.