It’s a little known fact that bubonic plague killed over 100 San Franciscans between 1900 and 1902, in part because public health officials and the mayor botched the response, first by imposing a quarantine based on race, then by denying the extent of the epidemic to keep the city’s economic boom going. Several later waves took fewer lives but tarnished the Golden City’s image.
This bit of epidemiological history is of interest in its own right but also for its effect on the life of Wilma Soss, the subject of my new book Fearless (with Jan Traflet). Born in San Francisco in 1900, PR pioneer and media maven Soss later quipped that the earth shook when she was born. We found no evidence of an earthquake that day but the plague helps to explain why Soss was in Brooklyn with her maternal grandparents that fateful day in April 1906 when her birth city first shook and then burst into flame.
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