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An Oral History Interview
With Wanda Koger
Interviewed by Donald Koger
3 October, 2020
Piscataway, New Jersey
Wanda Koger is a 62 year old resident of Piscataway, New Jersey. She lives with her husband, her younger son, and two of her nephews. On October 3rd, 2020, she was interviewed by her younger son, Donald Koger to document her memories of the days surrounding the March 11, 2020 declaration by the World Health Organization that COVID-19 had become a pandemic.
Donald Koger: Today is October 3rd, 2020 and my name is Donald Koger. This begins an Oral History Interview with.
Wanda Koger: Wanda Koger.
DK: Do we have your permission, first of all, to record this conversation?
WK: Yes, you do.
DK: I am going to use the contents of this interview for a class on documenting the [COVID-19] epidemic. Beyond that, I would like it to be your donation to the library for their safekeeping and maybe future scholars might use it. I would like to make sure you’re okay with making this donation of the information from your oral history.
WK: Yes, yes I agree to that.
DK: Okay. So we are going to record our conversation today and then I’m going to type up a transcript and then that will be put in the library going forward.
WK: Okay.
DK: I’d like to talk to you about the COVID-19 Pandemic which has been going for some time now. The World Health Organization officially [declared] the pandemic on March 11th, [2020]. Living in New Jersey, I’d like to hear about what your experiences were. What do you remember first about the pandemic?
WK: I guess just hearing about how it was affecting everything. In the beginning, some places were starting to close down. You heard that it came from China. I think as far as letting the public know what was going on, they misled us or whatever. My feeling in the beginning was that this was going to get worse. It wasn’t going to just stay here for a little bit and go away. That it was just going to spread and get worse and worse. As far as my thinking, that it was going to last possibly up to a year. The way that it was spreading, and things were up in the air whether or not, at that point, rumors that things were [going to be] closing down, companies [would be] having people work from home. So, it was just like the beginning of things starting [to get ready] to shut down.
DK: Did you feel, at the time, that you were being intentionally mis-led or do you think that people just weren’t sure what was going on?
WK: Well, I don’t know. Maybe they weren’t just saying certain things so that people wouldn’t panic. They really had the brains to know that China was lying to them and things were way worse than what they said they were. You’re hoping maybe they were more on trying to keep people calmer than actually not knowing, or blindly believing some of these other countries were saying about things that were going on; that there’s no way to verify exactly what was going on in their country and now it was spreading all over.
DK: What are some of the things that you felt changed right away?
WK: I guess maybe I’m a little bit luckier than some other people. I happen to be retired. So, as far as things starting to close down: stores, bars, and people working from home and all that, it didn’t have that much of an impact on me in the beginning. The main thing was grocery shopping, food shopping. That’s something that you had to do. Otherwise, it’s not like I had to go anywhere. You do have to get the food, so that’s maybe in the beginning, something that changed. It wasn’t like “oh gee, I’m out of milk, let me run over and get milk.” Sometimes, you go to the store to get milk and bread and you come home and you forgot the bread. So you turn round and go right back. Now that this is starting, things like that were not, … you just couldn’t do that. You weren’t really that comfortable doing that. You had to make sure that you had your list and you were going to get everything that you needed at one time.
DK: So it sounds like you were trying to limit the number of trips that you made to the store.
WK: Yes. Even as far as myself limiting and the whole family at that point started to curtail activities. You know, going here or there. And then even starting to question at that point, “gee, you’re invited to this function and it’s a very good friend of yours and you want to go but you’re like do I go, do I not go? What’s going on here?” Deciding “at this point I’ll go, but I just wont stand near anybody and I won’t shake anybody’s hand or give them a hug or anything else. I’ll just stay away from them and that should keep me safe.”
DK: So, you were spending more time in the house?
WK: Yes, spending more time in the house. Everyone else in the house at that point started staying home more.
DK: How many bodies are in your household?
WK: At the beginning, we had four of us in the household.
DK: I assume that some of them were spending more time outside of the house, working, going to social things?
WK: Yes. [interposed].
DK: Did that change quickly?
WK: I want to say. … It’s kind of hard to remember the beginning, because it was so long ago and the new norm has been everything locked down, everybody home for such a long time. It’s hard to remember exactly when that started, but I think in the beginning, people started staying home more. My husband was starting to work from home and so that kind of had more of an impact than with the schools closing. My husband working from had an impact on my daily life because I was so used to being home alone and you could blast your music all you wanted all day long and you just had the house to yourself. Now, all of the sudden, you have two other people there that have to have some type of a quiet, they’re working. The conference calls still go on, they still need to have their business meetings. Life didn’t stop, it just kind of adjusted.
DK: What’s that like? To go from having the house just between you and the dogs all day, to now, having working adults in the house trying to create mini office spaces? What was that like?
WK: In the beginning, my husband used the kitchen table. That only lasted for like a day or so, and then I kicked him upstairs, up to our bedroom to use as an office. Because down here, I couldn’t have the TV on, you couldn’t vacuum, you couldn’t do the dishes, you couldn’t do the wash, he’s trying to concentrate and trying to work, trying to have business meetings. I have this whole great big house that now I can just sit, because there’s two other people here that are in spaces that are more open, that are trying to do their stuff. So, it was a bit of a change.
DK: How did your grocery buying habits change? Did you take advantage of any online shopping?
WK: It changed. I would say, it changed dramatically. Before, you would just go to the store. If you had to go two or three times a week, no big deal. If you needed to go, you just went. Now, in the beginning, I was a little bit more leery. Some of the stores offered senior hours. Or if they didn’t, I would go right in the morning at like 6 o’clock when they would open up and get your groceries there. The stores had already started to put up the safety guards for the cashiers, some of them had the lines going down the aisles so everybody was going one way so you weren’t running into each other and in certain areas they spaces, especially checking out, they had things on the floor that would keep you six feet away from everybody else. Then, finding that things just were not in the stores. The first thing, of course, that went was the toilet paper. Toilet paper and then all your paper products and your hand sanitizers, all of your cleaning things, anything that had bleach in it. It just disappeared. You’d go down the aisle, they would be completely empty. We were lucky in that case, as far as we did have some that we usually keep on a regular basis. But still, wherever you could get it, you would go and get it. Even if you got a roll, that was fine. We didn’t go to the point of trying to hoard it, if we did find some. I would buy my one package and that would be it. Even in the beginning, the hoarding with the toilet paper was something completely new. Usually, in the past there’s a storm, there’s something going on, people go to the store and buy milk, eggs, and bread. But this time, for some odd reason, people bought toilet paper. You can do without milk, you can do without your eggs, your bread, but toilet paper is something that’s very essential. You do need it. So hoarding of that started right in the beginning.
Then, using the online, I’m not computer savvy. I don’t shop online, I don’t understand it, I don’t like going through the apps and having to do all the little things that you have to do. Scheduling, even in the beginning, it seemed like if you did find something and you got through a site you were able to order the things that you wanted, there were no delivery dates. The delivery dates would be, for the whole month, they were gone. So you had to find a store that actually had a date you could have delivered. Or you wouldn’t even be able to go and pick it up. So we did work with my son who lives about a half an hour away as far as as if he could get online get something, he would have my list and I would have his list just in case we were able to find things. Then we would go over and you would drop the groceries on the doorstep and wave to the grandkids through the window because there was no physical contact.
One of the things that changed too, right away, was if you did bring groceries home, or anything that came to the house, you wiped it down. You had the sanitizing wipes and everything, everything got wiped down. If a box came and it wasn’t perishable, you’d actually let the box sit there for a day or so. And you’d even wipe the box down before you brough it in the house. We started right away. We went as far as we had a sign on the door: “We have people with compromised immune systems, please do not knock on the door. If you need to contact us please,” and we left a phone number there. We started doing that.
The social stopping didn’t start right from the beginning. You still went some places, but you were starting to curtail, quickly, where you were going and what you were doing. In the beginning, I know that I didn’t wear masks, not right in the beginning. Even starting a little bit later on, at the end of the beginning, to get masks to be able to wear them, it was hard. You could not find someplace that was selling them. To order them online, it would take three to four weeks. So, in the beginning, you saw some people wearing them and some people not wearing them. In the beginning, it was like “okay, you don’t have one on, then I won’t stand next to you.” Or, if you’d go to the grocery store and you were walking down the aisle and you see someone without a mask, I would turn around. Or you’d go into a line and the cashier happened to have her mask down to her chin, even with the splash guard on, I would not go to her aisle. Thinking that, “yeah I don’t have my mask on, but I am going to at least keep my distance.”
DK: You adopted physical distance from others even before the masks were normal?
WK: Yes.
DK: More personal space?
WK: Yes that was the first thing because that was the easiest thing to do. You stay away from people. They’ve always done the sneeze thing, how far your sneeze will go. It was cheap, it was free. Easily accessible, you just didn’t go near anybody and you didn’t touch anybody. That was the first part of trying to protect yourself and other people.
DK: You mentioned that some products became harder and harder to get. Was it gradual, or was it abrupt?
WK: The oddest thing, the toilet paper was abrupt. Boom. The toilet paper disappeared.
DK: You lived through a number of floods, so how would you compare? In the early days of this, you saw that it was going to get worse. How does that compare to when the floods happened?
WK: With the floods happening, that was surreal. We have lived a couple of floods. Your house was completely gutted. You had the National Guard walking down your street giving out water, the area where you lived, you could only get in through [showing] ID. In your area, it was like a little war zone there. But you would go outside your area, like up over the hill and it was perfectly normal. The world went on, everything as normal. With this, in your little world, things have changed. When you go outside your little world, they’re not better. They’re the same. It’s not like when you have a disaster like that, it’s more confined. It’s happening in that area and it’s gonna affect that area. When you have something like this, you can’t go someplace where it was “normal,” where you didn’t have the fear of standing too close to someone.
DK: Were there product shortages?
WK: In the beginning, the only product shortage, and I can only do this from a personal thing. The only products, like the first couple weeks in March, were the toilet paper.
DK: I mean with the floods?
WK: With the floods, yes there were shortages. There was, in my little town, I remember they opened up the Drug Fair. They really didn’t have everything going on there, so they would only let like five people go in the store at a time. But, at the same time, if I wanted to, I could get in my car and I could drive over to the next town or the next town that wasn’t affected by the flood and buy everything I wanted. There wasn’t a shortage there. It was more confined to the area, and of course this is just my experience, just confined to the area where there was the flooding that had happened. It wasn’t like I couldn’t drive a half an hour or an hour and get whatever I wanted. Everything was normal an hour away. During this, it seems like it seems like it was all over. It wasn’t necessarily confined to a certain area. Every place was seeing, I think the whole United States’ toilet paper was bought out. I don’t know who had it in their basement but somebody did. [laughter]
DK: I still want to know where it all went.
WK: Yes, I want to know where it all went. [laughter]
DK: What was the moment, if you can remember, where this became real to you? Where it wasn’t just something on the news but it was, this is real; this is happening?
WK: In the beginning, of course my older son was like, for the protection of his children, we could go and see them through the window and wave. No personal contact, which I totally understand because that’s your parental protective mode: to protect your children by all means. That was understandable and I was okay with that because he was doing something that I would have done to protect. Everybody in our little household was not going anywhere, starting to realize and use safety measures. I think what really started to make it real was when I started to get frustrated, to get angry. [throat catch] It may sound like a little stupid thing, I guess it was my nephew. He was in Job Corps courses in Pennsylvania and we had just dropped him off there in, I think it was January. Now, this was going on in the beginning of March and it was like, you hear these things going on. At this point, of course, things were starting to close down. The rumors of things closing down. It was like, well now, I have my nephew there and I can’t, you couldn’t protect him. You would call, and it was the only thing that really kind of hit me because everything else you could protect, or was being protected. But this was something that was out of my control, I would call the school and ask: “are you closing, are you closing?” Not being able to go there and say “you need to come under my umbrella.” To protect.
This thing was just, you knew that it was just going to get worse, and I knew deep down inside that there was no way in hell that this was not going to affect younger people. I mean, that was just a ridiculous idea. Being that, of course the cell phone reception there was terrible, so it’s not like you could call. They weren’t giving any information because they didn’t have any information. Other schools closer to the 10th, 11th, whenever, were already starting to close. So here, this was not closing. So that I think was, maybe not when it hit me, because I knew that it was going to happen, I knew it was going to go on, but I kind of figured we would be okay, but then I had somebody that was outside that I had no way to protect. I think that was what really made you kind of angry.
DK: Right, because your older son and his household, they can lock the doors.
WK: Well, I know that he will protect his family. He will protect his children to the end.
DK: Your younger son lives with you.
WK: Yes.
DK: And you have one other nephew living with you.
WK: Yes.
DK: And your husband. And you have another nephew who had lived with you before going to school. And so, at this point, March 10th Rutgers decides they’re going to start spring break a couple days early. Your other newphew’s school had closed around the same time. So your son is now home, your one nephew is home. So you, your husband, your son and your nephew are in the house. So then, this other nephew, who lived with you is now. …
WK: Back home.
DK: He’s still in school on March 10th?
WK: Right, right.
DK: So, March 10, he’s still in school and the school is not?
WK: They haven’t decided and it was crazy as far as, even when they were having the news conferences and stuff and they couldn’t say “yes, we’re going to close Friday.” A lot of times it seemed like, in the beginning, now I can’t remember exactly when they started closing everything down, but I know when they did start, it was like “oh, tomorrow we start homeschooling.” There really wasn’t a lot of warning as far as closings go. They were just, all of the sudden: “Guess what, it’s happening tomorrow?”
DK: Right, so your nephew, only because I have notes here, I’m cheating. Your older nephew, who had been living with you and was now at school. Then March 15, they’re telling him “hey, we’re probably going to close.” And then March 16, you get the phone call from him saying “hey, come get me.”
WK: Yes.
DK: So that’s jumping a little ahead. We want to stay in the early days, I don’t want to get too far ahead.
WK: Going to pick him up, and it was really odd. I don’t recall, even at that point as things were closing, that I was wearing a mask. I can not really say that, I know that definitely way in the beginning I wasn’t. I think that in the beginning, I wasn’t out going all over the place, just going to the store. At that point, just trying to keep a distance from people. It was also that the masks were not available.
DK: I remember the masks being really really hard to get. Even when people wanted them.
WK: Yes. You had to order them and wait three or four weeks for them to come in. So, even in the beginning, if you wanted to use them, a lot of people used the bandanas or just t-shirts or whatever to cover your mouth and your nose.
DK: If you could go back and have Wanda Koger from March 1st sitting across the table from you, what advice would you have?
WK: Prep. Get your essentials. Start making, cooking is not one my things. I would rather go out to eat. So it would be, start making your meal plans with the basics. Like what we did with my other son, we combined doing some online ordering together to be able to get things. Prep, it’s going to be a long haul. I have to knock wood on this [thumping sound], I mean, I am so so luck as far as financially. My husband wasn’t laid-off. He had to work from home and we didn’t have to worry, as far as losing that money, but at the same time just prepping because it’s going to be a longer time than you think. Take advantage of the time of everybody being home. It did have a benefit as far as being everybody eating dinner at the same time, at the same table.
DK: Was that not something, you didn’t do normal dinners before?
WK: We did, but this was a little bit different than the every day because sometimes we didn’t . Sometimes people had things to do, they had projects, classes, whatever to go to. Scattered. Now it was more that, now we have game night because everybody is together all the time. Definitely take advantage of the time with everybody being together. I should’ve exercised more. Get your household in order while you have the time and you don’t have to rush anywhere. You don’t have to be out of the house at this certain time and then going to work and coming home. You’re home for the whole day. When you’re off work at that time, it’s not like you have a half an hour drive home. You walk down the stairs and you’re out of your office. Take advantage of that time.
It’s [been] more cooking than I ever want to see done in a house again. Of course, it’s my experience, being that I’m retired and not having to go anywhere and been retired for the last couple of years. So, it didn’t affect me, the lockdown, as much as it did other people.
DK: Are there any other changes that you remember from the early days? Obviously people were in the house more.
WK: Yes, which had its good points and its bad points. Very annoying when you’ve got the house to yourself. Not annoying, but it’s just you’re used to having your own routine of you get up in the morning and you do this or that and you want to blast your music or have the TV on. Three or four TVS, you walk through every room and there’s a different channel on every TV. When you’ve got people home that are doing classes from home or working from home, you have to be quiet. Those changes and just not being able to go over, you can’t go see the grandkids. You really can’t go visit people and it’s frustrating that people want to see you or meet up with you and they’re like “Oh, I’m not sick, you know.” Or they get slightly annoyed at you for not wanting to meet up with them but it was like, it’s not worth it. You may not, but I don’t know who you’ve seen. Maybe you went to a birthday party, maybe you did this or that. You’re just not going to be able to get together in person for these people. You know, keep a distance.
DK: Is there anything else you’d like to add about your experience, in the early days of the pandemic?
WK: I hope I’ve covered everything. The beginning was such a short time. It just seemed that you heard about it, maybe a little bit in the end of January, February and then all of the sudden in March, boom. Things are closing down. The beginning was short-lived. I guess, looking forward, I wish I was more organized as far as having things done and also being able to be more able to just use the computer. Because when you’re in the lockdown, things like that, there is no going to the store. You have to do everything online or if you’d like to talk to people and things, a lot of it is online. With the grandkids, they would call with the Facetime. Those things were precious at the same time.
DK: Thank you very much for talking with me about your experiences in the early days of the pandemic. I’m sure we’ll talk again about your later experiences, the longer period thus far of the pandemic. Thank you very much for taking the time to talk with me and for allowing me to record this so that people in the future will have a better understanding of that people’s experiences were at this time.
WK: You’re very welcome, I hope I got enough information out there. It’s just kind of hard because it all, after a while, runs together. But thank you.
DK: Thank you very much. So this is the end of our session. This is the end of our session and I look forward to talking with you next time.
WK: Thank you.
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