The papers were starting to report that the Spanish Flu Pandemic was easing, but in truth November was one of its peak years (and in other parts of the globe it'd rage on for the entire next year). Reality hit as things were closed back up.
As bad as that was, the horrors of the Russian Civil War were pushing their way onto the front page of the local papers. And there was legitimate reason to fear that the result of the Great War in Germany might be communist revolution throughout the defeated empires of Europe, a disaster that was being appreciated, if not perhaps in its full potential extent.
Elsewhere, in Chicago, the very first issue of Gasoline Alley made its appearance in the newspaper.
Gasoline Alley was, at first, only a Sunday paper in the black and white Sunday cartoons of the Chicago Tribune. It soon became a daily.
The cartoon strip was one that appeared regularly, and maybe still does, in the Denver Post and occasionally in the Rocky Mountain News and I used to read it there. It's a cartoon I like, but as it's a serial, its never one that I'm current on the story line so I was never up on what was going on in it. The interesting thing about it for years and years, beside the content of the cartoon in general, is that it was a celebration of American garage culture. In that context, it's pretty significant that it appeared in 1918 when automobiles, if not wholly new, were sill very much a new things. They'd become common enough to be the subject of a cartoon at this point, which says something.
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