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Post by AztecWilliam on Mar 19, 2011 22:34:28 GMT -8
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Post by The Great Aztec Joe on Apr 5, 2011 13:28:04 GMT -8
I worked my way through all four years of high school in the mid 1960's living by myself in the office of a mobile home park for older retired people in Escondido. They would come in to pay their space rent in the evening because they liked to talk a little to a young fellow who would listen to their stories.They each had fascinating stories to tell. There were World War I veterans, and World War Ii veterans. All of the people had stories to tell about the Depression and most had seen the ugly side of it. Each month they came in to pay their rent they had different stories to tell. I never did any homework in highschool because I spend every evening with those fascinating old people
In many ways I took the place of the grandchildren most of them never saw, since they decided to retire from the Midwest or the North East and move out to California where there was lots of sunshine.
I leaned to love those people and in a way we were one big family of one grandson and a hundred grandparents who were waiting out the last years of their lives and always seemed to anguish over the loss of one of the community.
Escondido's one hospital was Palomar Memorial. The old folks knew and feared that Palomar was where they would go if they had an accident. Soon after they got there, they would develop pneumonia and die. It was always the same. You knew that the injured party would be dead within 24 hours when the old folks visiting them reported back that they had "the death rattle in their throat" when they visited them that afternoon. Sure enough the next day old Mr. Acke would be dead and two to three days later everybody would go down to Alheiser's mortuary to attend the funeral.
The old women would fall and break a hip and plead not to be taken to the hospital because they knew that it was a death sentence. It did not matter what you went to Palomar for, if you were old, you would always catch pneumonia and die. They all knew it and it always seemed to happen.
Now, I wonder if that was MRSA, or just pneumococcus bacteria that was killing the oldsters. One thing I learned for certain was that the last place old people wanted to be sent if they were sick was the hospital.
When I graduated from highschool in 1967 and entered the Navy eight of them died in the following year. I strongly suspect that they died because they did not have anybody to listen to them anymore.
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