A Pandemic Tragedy ~ 1918

This is a story of a good man who died too soon, and the family he left behind. It is a story of a hard-working Irishman, with a wife and two small daughters, who died at the age of forty-nine, a casualty of the influenza epidemic. John (Jack) Gorman was the father of my sweet mother-in-law, Dorothy Gorman Hein. Dorothy was eight years old when her father died. Her little sister, Margaret, was six. The year was 1918.

John Gorman was born April 9, 1869, in Donagal, Ireland, one of the poorest counties in all of Ireland. According to family stories, when John and the other Irishmen arrived in New York City, the locals threw rocks at them and shouted, “Get back on the train. We don’t want you here.” 

And that’s what they did. John and his fellow Irishmen, got on a train heading west. They came to Colorado, in search of gold and silver and plenty of work in the mines.

John rode as far as Denver and eventually arrived in Nederland, Colorado. I would love to know how he got there. Did he take a stage coach from Denver? Did he go to Boulder first? Maybe Central City? How old was he at the time? 

We know that John did not just work in the mines, although he must have when he first arrived. By 1911, he was also working in partnership with another Irishman, Jim Nolan. According to newspaper clippings, they were assessors ~ evaluating  the quality of Pine Creek gold, part of the Apex Mine system.

Later, John purchased James Noonan’s interest in mines in St. Anthony of the Lake Gulch. He sunk a shaft in St. Anthony of the Lake Gulch and by 1911, he and another partner, John Smith, successfully mined gold that was worth a considerable amount of money.

I tell you all of this, to illustrate that John Gorman was a smart, ambitious man. An immigrant who was determined to make his fortune mining gold in Boulder and Clear Creek counties. 

In 1909, John met an Irishwoman, who was also hard-working and determined to survive a hard life in the Colorado mountains. Margaret (Maggie) McNulty was born in Hannibal Missouri. She moved to Memphis, and then came west to Central City, where she met Jack. Together they had two girls, Dorothy, born in 1910, and Margaret, born in 1912. 

From all accounts, Jack and Maggie, had a good life. They lived in a small house in Nederland and Jack worked in the local mine. Dorothy remembered seeing her father ride his donkey up the hill to the mine. When he arrived at  work, he gave the donkey’s rump a slap, and the donkey turned around and came home by himself.

All of that ended in 1918, when Jack died of complications of the influence pandemic. The family was devastated. Maggie and the girls had  just enough money to come to Denver, and move into a little house at 500 South Broadway. They sold candy out of the front room, and lived in the back. The girls attended St. Francis de Sales Catholic school. 

Maggie later went to work at the Good Heart laundry, near the corner of Broadway and Alameda. The work was grueling and the pay was low. It was a very hard life for Maggie and her girls.

The girls grew up, married good, hard-working men, much like their father. Dorothy married Bill Hein and Margaret married Harry Gessing, two of the finest men on earth. Margaret and Dorothy were more than sisters. They were always dear friends, who loved to laugh, and dance, and have fun.

Maggie moved in with Dorothy and Bill and their six children. One day she was hit by a car, crossing the street as she left the Shamrock Bar with a friend. Maggie’s leg was broken and never healed well. She eventually lost her leg and had to move to a nursing home, where she died. 

Jim Hein, Maggie’s grandson, remembers his Nana as a woman who lived upstairs, wore a big fur coat, liked to tell stories and laugh. We can only imagine how her life would have been different if only her husband, Jack, hadn’t died ~ much too young, in the pandemic of 1918.