Polio 1952

 I typically write in the first person about events I experience firsthand.  This story is not mine, though I was technically present, being born in 1951.  I learned of it by interviewing my older siblings who were part of the story and painfully aware of these events which unfolded in 1952.  It is a composite of their memories.

I learned firsthand that three people remember more than one.  What happened that year made a lasting impact on our family and our neighbors.  This reconstructed account took place on two small farms in Central Illinois sixty-eight years ago. 

 

It started snowing while Dean McClure and two of his sons walked to the house after the evening milking, and when they made their way in the dark from the house to the dairy barn early the next morning the snow was still coming down. 

“How much you think it snowed Dad?”

“Hard to tell with these drifts, but it’s got to be at more than a foot.  Maybe a foot and half.  I’m surprised.  Feels too cold to snow.”

The December 1952 snowstorm in Central Illinois blew in from the southwest.  The McClure farm was three miles west of Danvers on Route 9 between Bloomington and Pekin.  State highway crews worked through the night to keep the hard road open, but the township gravel road running north and south past the farm was drifted shut.  Impassable.  It would be a while before the road commissioner could open up all the roads in his township with the scant equipment he had. 

“No school for you boys today I’d say.”

Darwin and Denny looked at each other and smiled.  Darwin was fourteen and Denny just turned twelve. 

It took the usual hour and a half to feed and milk the cows, tend the calves, and finish various morning chores.  When they got back to the house, they took off their winter gear in the basement and gathered upstairs in the kitchen for breakfast.  Mom seemed anxious.

“Henry and Edna talked to Doc Chione twice about Joyce this morning.  She’s not doing well.  He’s talking about putting her in the hospital.”

Henry and Edna were our neighbors a half mile south.  They along with their children Joyce, Don, and Barbara made up the Dunlap family.

Mom knew about the phone calls because of the party line.  When the phone rang for a neighbor every household on your party line heard the ring.  You were supposed to pick up the phone only if it was your ring.  The McClure ring was a long and short.  Dunlap’s was a short and a long.  If you heard the neighbor’s ring, put your hand over the speaker, and picked up the receiver gently, you could listen in unnoticed.

Mom learned a lot that way.  The phone was on Dad’s desk just outside the kitchen in the dining room.  Beside it was a chair.  Mom spent a lot of time in it.

Deanelle, age ten, was already at the table. She was holding David, the baby.  Peggy was buttering toast and piling it on a tin plate.  She, at sixteen, was closest in age to Joyce. 

The Dunlaps and McClures were close neighbors.  Henry and Edna farmed the Harris place a half mile south on the gravel road.  The closeness of the two families was more than proximity.  Both families attended the Presbyterian church in Danvers.  Darwin liked to hang around Don Dunlap, who at 17 was older and could drive.  Joyce was fifteen, just a year younger than Peggy.  Barbara, who was the same age as Denny, was closest to Deanelle.  They were together a lot. 

But it was Henry and Dean who had the longest and strongest relationship.  They not only helped each other farm, and shared equipment, they were best friends.  Each counted on the other in many ways. 

Barbara and Don Dunlap stayed at the McClure house when their sister Joyce, the Dunlap’s middle child, was thought to be infectious with the virus.  Some polio victims recovered from the initial fever with few effects.  Joyce on the other hand became more and more ill.

*The Poliomyelitis virus was officially named an epidemic in Brooklyn, New York, in June of 1916.  That year there were over 27,000 cases and more than 6,000 deaths due to polio in the U.S..  Over 2,000 of those deaths occurred in New York City alone.  The 1916 epidemic caused widespread panic.  Thousands fled the city to nearby mountain resorts, movie theaters were closed, meetings were canceled, public gatherings non-existent, and children were warned not to drink from water fountains, avoid amusement parks, swimming pools and beaches.  From 1916 onward, polio appeared each summer in at least one part of the country, with the most serious outbreaks occurring in the United States during the 1940’s and 50’s.

Polio was hard to understand.  Nobody quite knew how you caught it.  It was in the air, the newspaper said, and amazingly you did not have to be visibly sick to spread the virus to someone else. How were you supposed to know what to do to be safe?

Polio became real for Deanelle earlier that year when Mom announced the McClures would not be making their annual August end of summer trip to the swimming pool in Pekin with the Dunlaps.  The virus made going to swimming pools too dangerous, especially for kids.  Polio targeted kids.

“We can’t take the risk,” Mom said.

Deanelle objected most loudly.

“But what if everybody feels OK?  If we were sick you wouldn’t let us go.  I bet nobody that’s at the pool will even be sick. “

Deanelle didn’t want to give up her one chance to swim in a real pool all year, and a trip to the root beer stand on top of it.  It didn’t seem fair. 

“It’s not about feeling sick Deanelle.  Someone could infect you with polio even if they didn’t feel sick.  Dad and I are not about to put you in a big crowd of kids for a summer afternoon.  If you got sick, we’d never forgive ourselves.”

Darwin chimed in.  “Come on Nell, you want to live the rest of your life in an iron lung?”

The mere mention of an iron lung scared Deanelle.  She knew you got polio by breathing in something invisible, something exhaled by someone else who had the virus.  But she didn’t know what it was.  She couldn’t quite understand it, but she knew it was terrible.  It was bad enough looking at your friends to see if they looked sick, and to be scared to breathe, but thinking of being trapped in an iron lung put her over the edge. She had seen a picture of a girl in an iron lung in a magazine. 

Sue Miller, just a year older than Deanelle, contracted polio and it crippled one of her legs.  Neighbors talked like it was getting better but Deanelle saw how badly Sue walked, when she tried, and it looked awful.  They finally put her leg in a steel brace.  Sue lived on a farm a mile and a half away.  Where did she get polio?  And Joyce was right down the road.  It seemed like it was getting closer.  Deanelle was sure she was the next girl to be infected.  She broke into tears.

Denny walked into the kitchen just as his older brother posed the iron lung question to his sister and was walking into the dining room while Deanelle sobbed.  He stuck his head back in the doorway.

“Way to go Darwin.”

Darwin chased him all the way upstairs.

Iron lungs were the tragic symbol of Poliomyelitis.  Newly developed and terribly expensive, they were the ventilator of their day.  Negative pressure and mechanical compression allowed patients in iron lungs to breathe when their chest muscles failed them.  Patients were trapped, on their back, with mirrors tilted above to view those around them.  Some improved and were able to breathe on their own again outside the giant confining tube. Many did not.  When the disease advanced to that point, it was at its most lethal stage.

As Catherine McClure was putting breakfast on the table the phone on the desk rang a short and a long.  It was the Dunlap’s ring.  Catherine immediately looked at her husband Dean.

“Don’t Catherine.”

He knew his wife wanted to know who was calling the Dunlaps, if it was Doc Chione, what his instructions might be. 

“Let them be.  If they need our help, they’ll call us.”

Catherine was pulling her chair out to sit down with her family when the phone rang again.  This time it was a long and a short.  The McClure ring.  She was on the phone in seconds.  After saying hello, she just listened.  Finally, she responded. 

“Oh, Edna, I’m so sorry…No.  I understand…Of course Edna.  Yes.  Dean will do that…We’ll do anything we can.  Don’t worry Edna.  Joyce is gonna be all right.”

Mom hung up the phone and stepped back into the kitchen.  It was quiet and everyone’s eyes were on her.

“Doc Chione told Henry and Edna they have to get Joyce to the hospital as soon as they can.  It can’t wait.  The polio is moving up her spine.”

“How are they going to get Joyce to Bloomington in all this snow?”  Peggy asked.  Mom answered.

“Henry is going to hitch his team up to the box sleigh.  They’re coming up through the field.  When they get here, Dad is going to drive them to the hospital in our car.  Eat your breakfast quick, we have to get ready.”

Henry had kept his team of work horses after most farmers in the area had sold theirs.  That decision was mostly sentimental, except for corn planting.  Henry and Dean shared a horse-drawn corn planter.  It was old, but it worked fine, and new planters were expensive.

Henry’s sleigh was simply a box wagon outfitted with long runners for snow.  Farmers could take the wagon box from a wheeled running gear and put it on runners, making it easier for horses to pull loads on icy roads or in snow. 

“Why is Henry coming through the field Dad, and not up the road?”  Denny asked.

“Because Henry knows the road drifts bad on that little rise.  The wind is out of the west.  He’ll drive his horses up on the east side of the willows by the waterway.  The willows act as a windbreak and block the snow.  It won’t be as deep there.”

“I’m so scared for Joyce,” Deanelle said.  “She’s sick and she has to ride in that danged open sleigh behind those old horses.  It’s going to be so cold.”

“They’ll keep her warm,” Catherine said. “They’ll have their soap stones and Edna will wrap her up good.  Don’t you worry.”

Catherine walked over to Deanelle and put an arm on her shoulder. 

Dad was standing at the window over the kitchen sink thinking it through.  He was figuring out what Henry and Edna would need from his family. 

“Darwin and Denny?  Listen up now.  I want you to go to the garage and clear the snow from outside the door behind the Dodge.  Make sure I have a path to back out and turn around.  The driveway looks OK.  I think I can drive through that snow.  And if not, we’ll pull the car through the snow to the hard road with the horses.”

He went on.

“Now when they get here, I want the car running and warm.  Make sure it has plenty of gas.  Soon as we get Joyce into the car and Henry and Edna situated with her, I’m taking off.  Leave the box sleigh wherever it is.  Just unhitch the horses, lead them to the old barn, and tie them up in that open stall next to the bucket calves.  Make sure to give them enough rope so they can lay down.  Take off their harness, put blankets on them, shake some straw underneath them, and make sure they have oats, hay, and water.  Now get to scooping that snow.  I’d help you but I have to get cleaned up to go to town.”

Darwin and Denny came in after scooping and took their boots off but left their warm clothes on.  Denny was into the cookie jar while Darwin was looking south towards Henry and Edna’s place from the dining room windows.

“I see them!  Here they come!”

Making his way slowly with the team, Henry sat high on a spring seat at the front of the box sleigh.  He had a hat pulled low on his head and a scarf tied over his nose and mouth.  His feet were on a soap stone and he held the reins with chopper mittens.  Behind him his wife and oldest daughter were wrapped in horsehides, with wool blankets under them.  Under Joyce’s horsehide was another soap stone.

When farmers took their families for old-fashioned horse drawn sleigh rides on winter nights, they shielded themselves from the wind and cold with big horse hides and put their feet on small slabs of hot soap stone.  They warmed them on their heating stoves or registers and carried them to the sleigh by wire handles.  Soap stone holds heat for a very long time.

Just as Dad predicted, Darwin saw that the sleigh was close to the willows.  As the team and sleigh got closer, he could see a cloud of powdery snow kicking up from the horses' hooves and legs.  They were coming steadily but it was slow going.  The horses stepped up high before planting their hooves under the snow and pulling.

“Why are they going so slow Dad?”

“There are no tracks for the horses or the sleigh runners.  They’re breaking a new trail.”

“Will they make it?”

“Heck yes.  Good strong horses, not far to go.  Henry knows what he’s doing.”

When Henry and Edna arrived, they didn’t come into the house.  Henry brought the sleigh right up by the car and lifted Joyce into the back seat of Dad’s 46 two-door Dodge sedan.  Dean helped Edna into the back seat beside Joyce.  Henry sat on the passenger side. 

Catherine, Peggy, and Deanelle gathered by the Dodge to wave at Joyce.  Darwin and Denny were tending to the horses.  Mom had made a thermos of coffee.  She was holding her baby boy under a blanket when she passed the thermos through the window, leaned in, and gave her husband a kiss.  He had shaved and smelled like Old Spice.  He was wearing his gray felt hat and good clothes.

“Be careful.  When do you think you’ll be home?”

“I have no idea.  If I’m not home for milking the boys can do the chores.”

With that Dad drove away.  He had precious cargo in the back and no time to spare.  The snowflakes were growing smaller, and the temperature continued to drop. 

By 1950, the peak age of paralytic Poliomyelitis in the U.S. shifted from infants to children aged 5-9 years, with one third of the cases reported in persons over 15 years of age.  The rate of paralysis and death also increased during this time.  In the U.S., the 1952 polio epidemic was the worst outbreak in the nation's history and is credited with heightening parents' fears of the disease and focusing public awareness on the need for a vaccine.  Of the 57,628 cases of polio reported that year, 3,145 died and 21,269 were left with mild to disabling paralysis.  

December 24, 1952 fell on a Wednesday.  Barbara and Don Dunlap were at the McClure farm for Christmas Eve.  Their parents, Henry and Edna, were with their sister Joyce at Mennonite Hospital in Bloomington.  They had been there since Sunday.  Joyce was placed in an iron lung soon after being taken to the hospital in the snowstorm two weeks earlier.  Everyone thought she would get better quickly when she got help with her breathing.  But she didn’t.  Joyce was gravely ill.

Don and Barbara had visited Joyce at the hospital over the weekend.  They knew their sister’s situation was serious, but no one could or would talk about it.  It was a secret everyone shared but dared not mention. 

The days were so short.  When milking was done it was already dark.  Dick was home from college and Don was coming down Christmas Day from Oak Park with Aunt Fern and Uncle Vic.  Dean and Catherine’s seven kids would all be together.  With the Dunlap kids that made eleven people in the big McClure farmhouse on Christmas Eve.  Still plenty of room.

Mom always made chili on Christmas Eve and oyster stew for her and Dad.  Once supper was over Dad told everyone to go into the living room around the tree to open presents.  As people left the kitchen Dick hung back to talk to his Mom.

“What’s going on?  We don’t open presents on Christmas Eve.  We open presents Christmas morning.”

“Yeah.  Well, the Dunlaps open presents on Christmas Eve.  We wanted to do this for Don and Barbara.  We got them presents.  You kids open a couple too, and it will seem a little more like a normal Christmas for them.  Poor kids.  Joyce is bad Dick.”

“Is she dying?”

“She has bulbar polio.  That means the infection has made it to her brain stem.  She stopped swallowing yesterday.  And now, it is her breathing that’s gotten so bad.  She's terribly weak.  The iron lung helped at first, but she still went downhill.  It’s really serious Dick.  It’s nothing like the bout you had.”

Dick contracted polio  years earlier and had a fever for less than a week.  After that, a muscle in his abdomen, one of six, stopped working.  Paralyzed.  It was of no consequence.  The other muscles compensated for it.  He was lucky.

”Dad says Henry is scared to death, and you know Henry, he doesn’t get scared.  I’ve talked to Edna almost every day on the phone and I don’t know how she is going to keep going if Joyce dies.  I just don’t.”

Dick put his arm around his Mom, who was drying her eyes with a dish towel.

“Let’s go in there with them and act like we’re having fun,” Dick said.

Deanelle passed out presents.  She had helped Mom pick out a stocking hat for Barbara, and she bought one just like it for Deanelle.  The hats had yarn balls that hung from strings on the top.  

Darwin knew a couple tools Don wanted for working on cars.  They were gear heads.  Darwin wasn’t old enough to get a license, but he was already souping up an old car.  Don Dunlap was teaching him how.

Deanelle put the present they picked out for Joyce aside until she could open it herself. 

The kids were excited to watch the Dunlaps open the things they had chosen for them.  Everyone opened one gift, taking turns from the oldest to the youngest, starting with David the baby and ending with Dean.  After they finished the kids stayed by the tree looking at each other's presents.  Dean was taking wrapping paper away from the baby and putting it in a bag to throw away.

The phone rang a long and a short. 

Mom went to the dining room to answer.  She didn’t sit down in the chair.  When the call was over, she stepped into the kitchen.  Everyone heard her voice.

“Dean can you come in here for a minute?”

During the few minutes Dean and Catherine were together in the kitchen, the kids by the Christmas tree were silent.  As her Mom and Dad emerged from the doorway and walked towards them, Deanelle looked at her father’s face and began to sob.

Dean had a calming voice.  He seemed to always know what to say.

“Don and Barbara? That call was from your father.  I have sad news for all of us.  Your sister Joyce passed away a few minutes ago.  He wanted you to know right away.”

Everyone but Dean was crying.  Deanelle and Barbara hugged each other.  Peggy comforted her mother.  The baby ran to his mom and clung to her leg.  The boys didn’t know what to do.  Dean kept talking in a soft voice.

“She stopped breathing and there was nothing more the doctors could do.  She wasn’t in pain. Your Dad said it was like she was sleeping, and then she was gone.  He and your Mom were both with her when she passed.  They have a few more things to do at the hospital and then they’re driving here to get you and take you back home.”

“Deanelle and Peggy, why don’t you go upstairs with Barbara and help her get her things together?” Mom said.

They ran upstairs.  Mom continued to get everyone organized.

“Dick, I want you to go to the basement and bring up two jars each of green and wax beans.  We’ll make up some three-bean salad quick and have it for the Dunlaps when they get here.  We can slice up some ham for them too, from what we’ll have for dinner tomorrow.”

In the living room, still standing by the Christmas tree, Don Dunlap very quietly asked Dean a question.

“Did Dad happen to say how my Mom was doing?”

“No, he didn’t Don.  But I’m sure Henry is taking good care of her.  Try not to worry about your Mom.”

“I’m going to go outside for a minute if you don’t mind.”

“Go right ahead Don.”

“I’ll go with you,” Darwin said. 

“Me, too,” Denny said.

They went out the front door and off the porch.  Don Dunlap went to get something out of his car.  When he came back the three of them stood close together in the yard and shared a cigarette. 

Three farm boys, looking down the road toward the Dunlap house, trying to find words to say to each other that made sense.  Denny coughed softly. 

Sometimes those Central Illinois farms made you feel lonely, especially in the winter.  All the animals in their barns.  Big sky.  The fields around you flat and empty, stretching out of sight. 

The stars were out.  It was Christmas Eve and all was still.  How is it the world can look the same when everything about it has changed?

American medical researcher Dr. Jonas Salk announced the creation of a vaccine for polio in March of 1953.

In 1954, clinical trials using the Salk vaccine and a placebo began on nearly two million American schoolchildren.  

In April 1955, it was announced that the vaccine was effective and safe, and a nationwide inoculation campaign began.

By 1957, the first year the vaccine was widely available, new polio cases in the U.S. dropped to under 6,000. Although Polio still exists in parts of the world, incidence of the disease is now exceedingly rare.

*Factual information concerning polio and its history was taken from Wikipedia.