By Frank Cornacchiulo
In a placecalledbrooklyn.com Pepino said, Hey Joanie? Have you all gone crazy? What is it with this Rosie game you’re playing?”
Now they are calming down and sitting on the sidewalk together. “Yeah, Pepino, this is a crazy game! One of the girls heard about this game last week. She went to
the Red Hook Public Library on Clinton Street near the community center to look it up in the Encyclopedia Britannica. Well, what she found was that this game is hundreds of years old. Kids made it up and started playing this game in England a long, long, time ago. There was a plague killing thousands of people in London, England, and no one knew how to stop this disease from spreading all over the place. Men, women, and children were dying left and right. There were dead bodies everywhere, people were dying every day. Every time someone died, they put the bodies in the street! You can imagine the smell of all those rotting dead bodies lying all over the place. So, they picked up as many bodies as they could, they put them on wagons and piled the dead bodies up in an open field to burn them. But burning the bodies did not stop the disease from spreading and killing more people. Many of the people who lived there started carrying flowers like posies to mask the smell of the rotting bodies in the streets. Death was everywhere, no one really knows how or when the kids made up this game called “Ring Around the Rosie”.
It was just Happenstance that a sailor noticed that Rats were climbing off a ship that recently docked. He heard that Rats were carrying the virus, but no one knew how the Rats could spread it. That’s when the sailor realized that the Rats were traveling place to place on ships, and they were bringing the deadly Black Plague to various cities. That’s when they devised a system that prevent Rats from climbing off and on to the ships on the ropes that held the ship to the dock. So, they made large metal discs and attached them to the ropes to stop the Rats from getting off the ships when they docked. That’s how the virus was stopped from spreading. Once it was contained, millions of people were saved from this deadly disease.
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