The Scourge

The Scourge

                                      by Collette

Poliomyelitis, or polio, was the scourge of the 1950’s. Americans living during the 1930’s and1940’s witnessed the difficulties President Franklin Roosevelt endured from polio. Every mother feared her child might contract the disease. On a family trip to Yellowstone National Park, my parents took me to the doctor because I was showing symptoms, and I was only three-years-old. Fortunately, it must have been a virus.

Even after the vaccine for polio was developed, my mother still was cautious about contracting it. We had a county lake near us, but my sister and I usually rode our bikes to the local swimming pool in the summer. Mother never allowed us to go swimming in the month of August. Sometimes rivers do what my dad called “turn over” in this month. The water appeared dirtier, smelled and tasted horrible. I don’t know if her fear was because of the change in the water or something else. We never swam in the river, seldom went to the lake and the chlorine in the pool should have kept it fairly clean.

It is more likely so many kids gathering together in the last month before school started helped spread the disease. We girls just accepted the fact there was no swimming in August. A water hose and sprinkler were the way we cooled off in the hottest month of the year.

Never a proponent of shots, I liked the vaccine on the sugar cube and was delighted when all the schools got to walk downtown and participate in the mass vaccination. Only now as an adult do I understand how unique that experience was. The fact the entire nation was being vaccinated would not happen today as the outbreak of measles in the United States recently has shown. Surprisingly during my research at Eisenhower’s museum in Abilene, I found a picture of the President and his son, John. To prove the safety of the vaccine, Ike had his own son photographed taking a dose of it shortly after the testing trials ended. Dr. Jonas Salk’s discovery would eradicate the scourge of the 1950’s and the need for iron lungs.