For New Hyde Park resident, stranger's 1918 diary resonates during pandemic

No one can quite remember whether it was the summer of 1973 or 1974 when the old diary turned up in the back of the barn in upstate Nicholville. But John Hiller distinctly recalls his first instinct when he opened a dust-covered box and saw the canvas-bound book.

Get rid of it.

"I was just hellbent on cleaning out that old barn," he said, with a laugh. "To me it was clutter, not history."

His wife, Pat, recognized that the diary was more valuable than the rusty tools and rotting pieces of wood her husband was tossing in the trash bin outside their summer home. "I knew we shouldn't throw it out," she recalled.

Instead, they gave it to their daughter Lesli, who would have been in elementary school at the time.

Today it's still one of her most treasured possessions.

"I keep it next to my bed," said Lesli Hiller, now 54. "It's pretty much been everywhere I've been."

And now, the Excelsior brand diary from the year 1918 has taken on a new relevance.

Window to a different time

As a girl, Lesli particularly liked the quaint features included in the back of the book, such as a calendar of the moon's phases and eclipses, and a list of presidents up to Woodrow Wilson. She also perused the entries written by the original owner, self-identified in the diary as Goldda Sovay, a then 28-year-old native of Nicholville, located in St. Lawrence County, near the Canadian border.

For the adult Lesli, Goldda's diary has become a totem of her own childhood; a reminder of those halcyon days in the 1970s when, at the beginning of every summer, she and her three younger siblings, plus the family dog, would pile into the family's green station wagon for the six-hour drive north.

"You can imagine," chuckled her mom. "It was very adventurous."

At the time, the Hillers lived in East Rockaway, as John was establishing his law practice.

While he and Pat entertained thoughts of relocating to Nicholville, they eventually decided to remain on Long Island and sold the 55-acre farm in 1980. John Hiller went on to a distinguished career in law; now 77, he is chief court attorney for Nassau County's Supreme Court.

For their daughter, the diary remains a tangible connection to those summer days of her childhood, when she worked the farm, fished in the nearby St. Regis River and learned to ride horses.

"Of all our children, it was Lesli who remained most connected to the farm," observed her father.

While Lesli followed in her father's footstep professionally (she is an attorney for Nassau County Surrogate’s Court), her rides around the upstate farm on Miss Magic — a Shetland pony her father won in a poker game with some of the locals — sparked a lifelong love of horses. She became an accomplished rider, in addition to being a competitive runner and triathlete.

And then came the coronavirus.

One night in April, during the depths of what felt like a lockdown during the pandemic, she was at home in New Hyde Park watching television. "I saw something on the news about 1918 and that epidemic," she said, "and I said to myself, 'wait, the diary is from 1918.'"

Past becomes present

She retrieved the old book and reread the entries. Rendered in black ink on the lined pages of the diary, Goldda's terse sentences in the early part of the year chronicle life in an agrarian society.

Excitement seemed at a premium. The fact that Goldda ate green peas for dinner during a social visit to a neighbor is deemed worthy of mention.

But as the days march on, reminders of a larger, dark — and about to get darker — world, form in the background like storm clouds over the Adirondacks.

Thursday, July 23 a warm day. Walter Matthews came home today and tonight Wilfred Ploof shot himself. He was 26 years old. Dread of military service, they say, was the cause.

World War I was raging in Europe — and having an impact in remote St. Lawrence County. By October, as the war "Over There" — to borrow a phrase popularized by the 1917 George M. Cohan song — was in its final, furious weeks, the influenza epidemic was ravaging over here. In the next two weeks she notes the death of 10 local people from the pandemic that would kill an estimated 50 million people worldwide and about 675,000 in the United States.

Rereading the diary for the first time in years, Lesli transcribed entries — in Goldda's elliptical handwriting with raw, often unpunctuated prose — from the last few months of 1918:

Friday October 4 oh yes it is raining. Grace Woods Cutler died tonight of pneumonia following influenza. A dance at Joe Newton’s tonight

Thursday, October 10 nice day. Sure have got a headache nearly crazy this a.m. Nett stayed alone this a.m. Got up a couple of hrs this evening. Ward Thomas died this p.m. he was 30 year and three months old

Monday, October 21 cold damp day. Hailed this p.m. Nett not so well today. Violet Campfield a little better tonight wrote Clara Newell a long letter. Just hear that Earl Days’ wife father and sister are dead.

Wednesday, October 23 another perfect day. Bertha Bacon died at 8 PM. Sent for Jim but he did not get here in time to see her alive. Lanced Nett’s neck this am.

Friday, November 8 Rob has got the flue [sic] and so have I, my fever 101.2 Dr. Thought I had better come home.

Mon Nov 11. Peace declared at 6-00am. 1567 days of war. Great celebration everywhere.

Monday, December 2 some snow and keeps coming Jack McCabe was killed in the battle of [October] 29th Nett got the paper today

The epochal and the banal coexist, as the body count rises. Reading it again, Lesli said, prompted a number of questions. For example, "she doesn't mention anybody being in the hospital. It's like they were all sick and died at home," Lesli said.

That, according to Hilary Osborn Malecki, is quite likely the case. Malecki, a board member of the East Hampton Historical Society, has extensively researched the 1918 epidemic's impact on the East End, at the time also a largely rural society, probably not unlike that of Goldda Sovay's.

"There were very few hospitals, and all the towns were depleted of medical staff," Malecki explained. "Many doctors and nurses were involved in the war effort. Everyone was taken care of at home."

'An incredibly hard life'

One of the entry points for Malecki's research (which she has presented at a number of speaking events on the East End) was the discovery of a diary by Lillian Augusta Swezey, a Southampton resident who was 29 during the epidemic. Her husband, Ira, died of the flu in March 1919.

Swezey's observations about that period were vivid, but they were written retrospectively, in 1952.

The contents of Goldda Savoy's diary are likely untouched since the time it was written. That, Malecki said, is significant. "It's very rare to find this kind of material on the flu epidemic. If you were sick or taking care of eight sick people in your household, you probably weren't writing letters or keeping a diary."

The terse entries of Goldda's diary also suggest something else about folks living in these agrarian communities.

It was "an incredibly hard life," said John Hiller, who now resides with Pat in Lido Beach. "The people that we got to know up there, they literally lived off the land."

Goldda's bland recitation of deaths during the epidemic should not be construed as coldheartedness, Lesli believes. "I feel like it was so commonplace, especially with the war going on. For us, people dying at young ages is shocking. It didn't seem so shocking to her."

Goldda, in fact, survived the epidemic. According to her brief obituary, found in the Potsdam Herald-Record, she later married Charles B. Reed, a successful businessman from the area. After he died in 1945, she took over the insurance business he owned. She died in 1950, at age 60. The couple had no children.

"Now little book," reads her final handwritten entry, on Tuesday, Dec. 31, 1918, "your story is told."

In truth, Goldda Sovay leaves much unsaid about her story. Yet, said Hiller, when she came to the conclusion of the 1918 diary, a little book that has had a big place in her own life, "I wished there was a 1919. I would have liked to know what happens next."