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Now that the alert had been sounded, the case files quickly swelled. Within the week, more than 130 people, mostly men, had been stricken and hospitalized, and 25 had died. Each fresh report fueled the nation's anxiety, producing panicky calls to doctors and hospitals across the U.S. from people who developed any of the reported and not uncommon symptoms. For those relatively few who encountered the real thing, it was, as Richard Dolan of Williamsport, Pa., said, "unbelievable." His cousin, Jimmy Dolan, 39, became ill at the convention and died a week later. "It just has everybody stunned. Fellows your age, your friends, are dead. I never expected anything so sudden."
Nor did any of the 2,000 Pennsylvania Legionnaires who gathered in Philadelphia with friends and relatives for their convention. Staying in half a dozen different hotels, eating in various restaurants all over town, they listened to speeches, met old buddies and reminisced about their military experiences. "It was just like any other Legion convention," recalls Joe Chase of Philadelphia. "We were drinking, dancing, voting, having a good time. And now this horror."
The horror struck swiftly—and, it seemed, impartially. It claimed Charles Seidel, 82, a World War I veteran from Reading. People in Williamstown, an Appalachian town of clapboard houses, were stunned by the death of John Bryant Ralph, 41, a former newspaper publisher, horn player, baseball fan and one of the community's most popular citizens. Some avoided the funeral out of fear of contagion, but many others came to pay their last respects and watch sadly as Dolan, who had already attended his cousin's funeral the day before, presented the flag to Ralph's mother, Mildred Ralph. "It's terrible," said Betty Malick, 54, a friend, as she watched cemetery workers cover the grave. "The way they fought for their country and then had to lose their lives to something they didn't even know the cause of."
The fear was heightened with the report of the death of Andrew Hornack, 47, of Monessen, Pa. Hornack, a bus driver, did not attend the convention. All he did was drive the Keystone Cadet Junior Drum and Bugle Corps to Philadelphia for a parade the day before the convention closed. By the middle of the following week, he had come down with the disease. After a few days his condition worsened, and his mother insisted on taking him to the hospital, where he died. That event worried all the families of the children who had ridden Hornack's bus to Philadelphia. Said Mrs. Gertrude Tretter, a parent of one of the band members, who had acted as a chaperone on the trip: "It's really quite scary."