A total of 675,000 Americans died in the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic. Of the more 98,000 military personnel who died in World War I, a stunning 46% of them died as the result of the flu.*
Hamden lost fifteen of her sons in The Great War, at least one of them due to the pandemic. In October 2018, the Hamden Historical Society published a poignant story of one young man who honored the memory of his great-great-granduncle, Antonio Cardo, who died in the pandemic.
Antonio Cardo was born in Italy in 1894. Around 1912, he came to this country with his younger brother Joseph and worked for the Marlin-Rockwell Corporation until May 1918, when he was drafted into the U.S. Army.
While serving in the U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps in October that year, Private Cardo was stricken and died in the Spanish Influenza pandemic that killed at least 20,000,000 worldwide.
The young man at right is Private Cardo's great-great-grandnephew and namesake, Anthony Cardo, of Hamden. Majoring in military history in college, Mr. Cardo has researched the son of his 3rd Great-Grandfather Joseph Cardo, and discovered that the October 1918 date of his Great-Great Grand-uncle Antonio's death was same as his October 1994 birth.
In November 2018, Anthony Cardo, a 2013 graduate of Hamden High School, turned 24, the same age Antonio Cardo was when he died 100 years to the day earlier, while in the service of his adopted country during World War I. We know that Antonio Cardo would be very proud of Anthony and that his service and sacrifice were not forgotten.
