Before we were born, before the war, rains washed through the sparse topsoil and carved a great ravine through the red clay of the old cotton field behind our homes.
As boys in a crossroads town, we were free to roam and that fall when we were ten, when the last school bell of the day rang, our mothers, thinking we could find no trouble out of doors, ignored our daily adventures. They were relieved that our noisy energy was released somewhere else.
In cooler fall weather on sunlit afternoons, we tossed our school books into the green rocker on Ray’s front porch and hiked across the weedy fields, through the thicket of scrub oaks and hickory trees and slid down the steep banks into the sandy bottom of the gulley twenty feet below.
We harvested scuppernongs, ate, cramming more into our pockets. Playing at war, we threw clods of clay at imaginary enemies and called them names we heard our fathers use, the “Krauts” and “Japs” they battled in the war, enemies now hiding in the ravine behind our homes.
On Saturday mornings, Ray’s father read the paper, his shoulders bare except for great white scars from a flaming sea of oil when the mighty aircraft carrier Yorktown was wounded by torpedoes, and when desperate Japanese pilots, “Kamakase” the magazines called them, flew their planes into her sides, rupturing tanks and pipes, sending scalding steam and burning oil over our men. This sailor of two wars- he was only a boy in the first war, the “Great War”-sat shirtless and read his newspaper. His skin had grown back in a crazy quilt of scars, his tattoos of flag and “MOTHER” fading.
Ray and I were too young to care or ask our fathers much and busy with our own wars, contests of ball and bat, playground battles with small bullies. Our fevered imaginations in high gear, we had our own fights to win. We ran on tireless legs until that day in nineteen fifty- two when Ray was turning eleven.
He came down with a chill and then a fever. It was the summer the public swimming pools all closed and we had to cool off in the creek or swim in the steep-banked chalk mines, deep reminders of where the gleaming white kaolin had been dug, the water still and clear as glass, lifeless.
Ray came down with polio and went away to Warm Springs where President Roosevelt had tried to recover from polio by exercising in the healing waters. We had seen pictures of “FDR” in old newsreels. Of course we had no theaters, but a man came every summer and set up a “revival” tent and showed old movies and news reels. A sonorous voice described the scenes as grainy reels depicted our great president. He was floating, smiling, surrounded by children splashing with skinny legs that would not hold them up to walk on dry land. At school, we had placed our dimes in special slotted cards created by the “March of Dimes” campaign to raise funds to find a cure for the disease.
Ray came home in a great metal tank called an “iron lung”. It breathed for him. He was taken everywhere in his iron lung and was a kind of celebrity, cheered by spectators at basketball games, a symbol for the campaign to fund polio research. Ray recovered slowly, except for his legs. His parents prayed that every small gain was a sign that he would walk again, even though his young body was still frail. But soon his cheerfulness was resurrected despite the pain, despite the leg braces. It was a joy reserved for the innocent.
Summer came again. Ray dreamed of the great ravine, talked of sliding down its banks, said he would soon swim in the clear waters of the chalk mine pool again.
And he did, though on that first outing his determination carried him past where other boys might have helped and he sank without a sound, leaving all of us to wonder: If God could take away the best so young, what dangers lay ahead for us? Why was I spared?
I soon forgot to wonder amidst my daily living. All those crowded middle years dulled my heartful memories. Now they have returned.
HBO created an amazing movie about FDR called “Warm Springs”. I have the DVD and watch it every Thanksgiving. And I do the Thanksgiving time March of Dimes “Walk through the Lights” at Callaway Gardens to raise money for March of Dimes.
The Warm Springs movie shows the condition the Merriweather Resort was really in when FDR and Eleanor first visited it. It shows the many “clients/patients” trying to rehabilitate in the pool. The movie shows how FDR, a snobby, east coast wealthy man, totally despondent about the loss of his legs, became an advocate of the “polios” and a cheerleader for them while they exercised in the pool. And the local people became a supporter of FDR when he ran for office.
Get and watch “Warm Springs”. A heartwarming, and heart string pulling, true movie of the polio experience at that time.
Marnette,
Thanks for your comments on Warm Springs, the film. I am familiar with the film and touched on this story in several earlier pieces (“Mitchell and Warm Springs; A Connection Between Two Small Georgia Towns”, and the “Thomas Loyless” story. Loyless is portrayed in a couple of scenes in the film. I am collecting information on Loyless in order to determine if there is enough material to do a book length biography. He was at the time of his death one of the most famous journalists in Georgia and an outspoken critic of the KKK. None of this was appropriate to use in the Warm Springs film. My distant cousin, Dr. Neal Kitchens was the Mayor of Warm Springs and persuaded the townspeople to change the towns name from Bullochville to Warm Springs. He was a a physician trained in hydrotherapy–the principle method employed in convincing FDR to develop the institute there. In one of those turn-of-fate coincidences, my son was a client there for two years, as my childhood friend had been almost forty years later.
Joe
I was quarantined during that epidemic. I spent the weekend with my best friend to celebrate her 13 th bithday. On Monday her mother called my mother to inform us that Nancy was,in an iron lung, suffering from polio, and I was to begin a three week isolation. It was 1946. I did not suffer from the disease, but Nancy wore a leg brace for the rest of her life.
Peggy,
Like you I was quarantined as well. With a sore throat and fever that endured for three weeks I was kept in bed and the doctor visited me at home, fearing I too had polio-something my mother did not tell me until years later.
Joe
Joe,
My late uncle, Bob Knighton, was a polio victim in the 1950s, iron lung and all. He recovered, though, and lived long enough to echo Donald Trump’s anti-Obama screeds in the 2000s. Bobby was a sort of mentor to me, but, in retrospect, I didn’t take him all that seriously, which was just as well, I guess.
George,
Thanks. Speaking of vaccinations, we could all use one that immunizes us from that opinionated and ill-informed relative who seeks to tell us the “real” story.
Joe
Associated Press published several articles today about “ill-informed”….folks. And yes, they maintain that they, and only they, know the truth. And they won’t stop talking until they hear their opinion out of my mouth…..scary.