The Summer of 1952
what a four-year-old remembers, and what she learned later

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People ask me what I remember. I was four, so it's mostly pieces, the way you remember a house you lived in as a child: one room very clear and the rest gone dim. My mother filled in a good deal of it over the years. Where she did, I'll say so.

Before

We lived in a rowhouse in East Baltimore with white marble steps that my mother, Pauline, scrubbed every Saturday morning whether they needed it or not. My father worked at the shipyard. I had one little brother, a fat baby who ate everything, including a June bug once.

Every summer in those years there was polio, and every summer the mothers watched the newspapers. 1952 turned out to be the worst year of the whole epidemic in this country. More than fifty-seven thousand cases were reported that year. I didn't know any of that. What I knew was that the public pool closed in August, and that my mother wouldn't let us go to the picture show, or the beach, or the Fourth of July crowd at the park. If you had a sore throat or a stiff neck, your mother's face changed. I remember that, her face changing.

Nobody really knew then how polio spread, so people tried everything. Screens on the windows, swatting flies, keeping away from crowds and water and other people's children. I suppose they were trying to hold back the ocean with a teaspoon. I don't blame one of them. I'd have done the same.

August

It started with a headache and a fever on a hot Sunday. My mother says I wouldn't eat my supper, which was not like me. By Monday night my neck was stiff. On Tuesday morning I stood up out of bed and my left leg folded under me like a piece of string, and I sat down on the floor and didn't understand what had happened.

I remember the doctor coming up our stairs with his black bag. I remember my father carrying me down the marble steps to a neighbor's car, because we didn't have one. I remember the hospital smelled like soap and something sharp. They did a test on my back that I won't describe except to say that I didn't care for it, and then I was in a room by myself, and my mother and father were on the other side of a glass window, waving. Children with polio were kept in isolation at first, and parents couldn't come in. My mother told me later that she stood at that window every evening for two weeks and smiled until her face ached, and then cried all the way home on the streetcar.

The ward

After isolation they moved me to the children's ward, and that is where I spent the fall. It was a long room with high windows and two rows of white iron beds, and there were children in every one of them. At the far end were the iron lungs, the big round machines that breathed for children whose chest muscles had been paralyzed. You could hear them all night, a steady sighing sound, in and out. I was afraid of them at first. After a while the sound put me to sleep.

The nurse I loved was Miss Hylton. She had red hands and a laugh that went up at the end, and she sang to us during the hot packs. The hot packs were the Sister Kenny treatment, named for an Australian nurse who had fought the doctors for years to try it. They would steam strips of wool blanket, wring them out, and wrap them around your arms and legs, hot as you could stand. The ward smelled like wet sheep from morning to night. To this day, if I get caught in the rain in a wool coat, I am four years old again.

After the hot packs came the stretching. The physical therapists worked our arms and legs, bending and pulling, over and over, every day. It hurt and I cried, and Miss Hylton would sing louder. Now that I'm grown, I understand that those women were saving our legs, and I wish I'd thanked them.

In the next bed was a girl named Myra who was five and therefore very wise. She had a rag doll with button eyes and she let me hold it on Sundays. Myra went home in October, walking with two short crutches, and she waved to me from the door. I never saw her again. I hope she has had a good life. I think about her more than you'd guess.

The dimes

At home, my mother did the only thing a mother could do from the other side of the glass. She saved dimes. She got a card from the drugstore with little round slots in it, and she filled it with dimes and mailed it in to the March of Dimes, and then she got another card. Money was tight. She saved them anyway, out of the grocery change, one dime at a time.

The January after I came home, she put on her good coat and walked our whole block for the Mothers' March, knocking on doors after supper. People turned on their porch lights to show they'd give. She told me every light on our street was on that night. She walked it every January until the vaccine came, and then a few more besides.

Coming home

I came home a week before Christmas in a steel-and-leather brace on my left leg, with a pair of short crutches. My father carried me up the marble steps. My little brother had learned to walk while I was gone, and I was furious about it.

Learning to walk again took the better part of two years. The exercises went on at home, every evening, on the living room rug. My mother did them with me after the supper dishes. By first grade I was walking with the brace and no crutches, and by fourth grade the brace came off for good. I always had a limp, and I never could run, but I could dance at my wedding, and I did.

President Roosevelt

Every child in a polio ward in those years knew about Franklin Roosevelt, though he had died before most of us were born. He had polio as a grown man, years before he was President, and he never walked on his own again. He went to Warm Springs, Georgia, because swimming in the warm spring water helped him, and he started a place there for other polio patients. He also started the national foundation that became the March of Dimes. People mailed dimes to the White House by the bagful. After he died, his face went on the dime, and it's still there. When I was little I thought that was because of us.

Tuesday, April 12, 1955

I was in first grade. In the middle of the morning the principal came to our classroom door and said something to our teacher, and our teacher sat down at her desk and put her face in her hands. We were terrified. Then she looked up and she was smiling and crying both, and she told us that a doctor named Jonas Salk had made a vaccine to stop polio, and it worked. The announcement came ten years to the day after President Roosevelt died.

That afternoon I heard church bells. When I got home my mother was sitting at the kitchen table with the radio on and a dish towel in her lap, and she didn't get up to start supper for a long time. My little brother got his shots that year. I didn't need them. Polio had already done what it was going to do to me, and I remember feeling, at seven, both glad for him and left out, which tells you something about first graders.

In the early 1960s Dr. Albert Sabin's vaccine came along, the kind you could take by mouth, and my youngest brother took his on a sugar cube in the school gymnasium, with half the neighborhood in line. After that, polio faded out of this country. The children born after 1960 mostly don't know what it was. That is the best thing I can say about the whole business.

Then and now

I tell this story because the people who remember those summers are getting gray, and because forty years later polio came knocking again for some of us in a different coat. I don't say it to make anyone sad. I came through it. My mother came through it. We had a good life, and I still do.

And I tell it for one more reason. If you have children or grandchildren, please, get them all their shots. I have met too many mothers who never had to watch a window.