Closet memories

Lifestyles ran a story in Thursday's Spot about how our clothing sometimes holds special memories (and sometimes groans of horror). Everyone has had the moment when they went through their closet and remembered a special date because of a special outfit and I'll go so far as to say that we've all had one of those "What was I thinking?" moments.

Take a minute to share your own clothing memory in the comments section.

Here's mine.

My mother used to make Sunday dresses and other clothes for me and my sisters. They always matched, especially those worn for major holidays. Although I don't have any of those items anymore, every time I see us in those photos I ask my mother if it was fun to torture us. Evidently it was because there's a lot of them...

Typhoid Mary

I don't watch a lot of TV, but in an effort to procrastinate last night, I watched part of a show on etv (South Carolina's public broadcast station) about Typhoid Mary.

I'd always heard the term used to describe someone who made everyone else sick, but I'd never learned about her in school or really heard anything about her.

Turns out, Typhoid Mary was a real person - Mary Mallon, an Irish immigrant to the U.S.

She was discovered as the cause of several typhoid outbreaks. She claimed she couldn't be transmitting the disease since she didn't have it. Well, part of that was true. She was the first "healthy carrier" of typhoid fever. The New York health department sent her to an island where they housed other infectious disease patients and essentially had her in solitary confinement.

She fought back and it's probable that William Hearst paid for her legal fees in her lawsuit against the city. She lost that suit, but was eventually released. Mallon was told to never work in the kitchen again because that's how she was spreading the disease. She worked as a laundress for a while, but eventually went back to cooking. She was caught after a number of doctors, nurses and patients got sick with typhoid fever. When officials investigated, they found her working in the kitchen.

So they locked her up on the island again. She ended up dying there of a stroke a number of years later, at which time she was working in the hospital on the island in the lab.

Forty-seven illnesses and three deaths were attributed to Mallon. She didn't infect the most people, nor was she the only healthy carrier who lied and went back to work in the food industry. She was, however, the most severely dealt with - because she was obstinate and fought with the health department and because she was an Irish woman immigrant. Prejudice played a role in her treatment.

The whole thing, however, made me think: Is it right to confine someone with an infectious disease because it's in the interest of the public good?

And now the next time someone's called a "Typhoid Mary" I'll know where it came from.

Cleveland County football

Football here is like nowhere else.

I grew up only a few counties away - my high school won probably three games in four years. I probably went to as many games. I didn't even attend homecoming most years - we always lost anyway.

So when I came to Cleveland County for college, I was surprised to see that people really got into it around here. I guess it's because it's a tradition that people can pass on from generation to generation. It's good to win, but even better to be closer to the people you're around. Football is one of the many common threads in the fabric of this community.

That's something you can be proud of.