The current crisis over the Corona virus reminded me that I had my own tragic experience with an epidemic. In 1952, the worst polio epidemic ever struck the United States. I was only a schoolboy of ten, and my experience with polio was limited to the “March of Dimes” campaign to raise money to finance scientific research that we hoped would lead to a cure for the disease. This was the first major philanthropic effort based on small donations, crowd sourcing for that generation. School children kept cardboard cards with slots for dimes. We dutifully filled the slots and presented them to our teacher who then forwarded them to the national organization. The March of Dimes was an urgent matter. Recurring outbreaks worldwide had stricken mostly the young, leaving them crippled. Even the president was a victim.

My parents thought of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as a distant, much- loved relative, a part of their family. They had grown up for the most part during the Depression and World War II, while FDR was president (1933-1945). My mother kept photos and articles about FDR in her scrapbook, just as one might have done if the photos and articles had been about a grandfather or uncle. Like many, she still had a copy of the newspaper announcing FDR’s death in 1945 in Georgia at his “Little White House.” She passed it on to me before her death at 92.

Though often despised by southern conservatives, FDR had done more for the South than any president before or since. And, he loved Georgia. It was where he came for the relief offered by exercising in the warm waters here that became a Mecca for those stricken by polio. He even maintained a home in Warm Springs and bought the resort hotel (on credit) which became the focus of the rehabilitation center there.  The iron lung, an enormous body-enveloping air chamber used to inflate and compress the polio victims’ lungs was the heart-renting symbol of the suffering every parent feared might befall their child.

My turn to face the terrible possibility of contracting polio came in the summer of 1952. After World War II, my parents and I lived in rented houses across the southeast as my father followed construction work from place to place. I attended 21 public schools by the time I completed high school. During my tenth year we lived in Vashti, Georgia. For the first time I could recall we stayed long enough in one place for me to have a regular friend, “Junior.” He and I were in the same class at school-which was just across the street from our homes. We became inseparable.

Why our mothers allowed it, I cannot imagine, but everyday after school (unless it was raining or freezing) we grabbed our air rifles and headed for the enormous gully behind our homes. Vashti was a small town then, a place where Augusta families had summer homes, only a crossroads with a school and two churches, one Baptist, one Methodist. The entire town, it seemed to me, would not have filled the gully. With walls that seemed at least thirty feet high, the ravine was said to run all the way to the Savannah River several miles away.  We frightened each other by imagining what sort of man-eating creatures might find their way up the gully from the primordial swamps of the great river.

Ray and I waged war in the gulley against small armies of other boys who relished the freedom and wildness of the place.  Sometimes we would encounter a herd of feral goats, living relics of a one-time farm. Full- grown trees grew from deep in the gulley, suggesting it was decades old. We had studied about erosion in class. Old magazines and posters reminded us that the South was a devastated wasteland, its soil washed away by generations of abusive farming practices. Wild grapes grew on draping vines along the edge of the gully and with a little pruning we made swings of the biggest vines and Tarzan -like swung from one side of the gully to the other -or fell somewhere in between. We were living like wild boys in a paradise.

Even before the school year was out, my father announced that we would be moving to Augusta where he would supervise the construction of a new building. After much pleading by Junior and me, our parents agreed that I could stay with Junior’s family until school was out. This became my first experience living in a family in which the father was at home during the evening hours and weekends. My father’s engineering field work kept him away all hours and often Saturdays as well.

 Junior’s dad was a remarkable man, as was my dad but in a different way. Junior’s father had served in the Navy during both World Wars. I came into breakfast one morning to finding him sitting at the table wearing an old-fashioned undershirt that covered his chest but had only thin shoulder straps, revealing an array of tattoos including a red heart inscribed “Mother.”

Across his heavy shoulder was the word “Yorktown.” As he would later tell us a bit at a time, he had been aboard the  carrier Yorktown at the Battle of the Coral Sea  where the ship was so badly damaged it had to be brought back to Pearl Harbor for repairs, a task that was amazingly finished in days because the ship was urgently needed for the coming attack by the Japanese fleet on Midway. The Japanese maneuver was designed to draw in the US carriers for a show down. Midway was the greatest naval battle in history and the first decided entirely by ship-based aircraft.  A combination of Japanese mistakes gave the victory to the Americans. Junior’s dad wore enormous scars across his back, reminders of the day he had leaped into an oily, burning sea as the Yorktown was sinking, damaged beyond recovery.

The affection between Junior and his parents was profound. I felt somewhat envious and, of course, a bit guilty for thinking this. I imagined that this was what “normal” family life was like.

In June I joined my family in Augusta. We lived in a new but tiny cracker-box house purchased with a “GI loan.” Readily available loans for veterans had spawned a housing boom and “sub-divisions” sprang up around most cities as returning soldiers whose lives had been on hold, returned to marry and start families. My father had done a brief stint in the Army, but the war had ended by the time he completed his training. 

 It was the summer of polio. Pools were closed and parents took their children to swim only in creeks and ponds. Public pools were closed because it was thought that polio was contracted in public pools. Despite this precaution, I got sick. It seems inconceivable compared to today’s practices in which we only see doctors in their examining rooms, but the doctor came frequently to check on me. Penicillin shots did nothing to halt my soaring fever or cure my perpetually sore throat. My mother feared the worst and my confinement was likely out of fear that I might spread my illness-polio?-to others. The papers were full of polio tragedies that summer and my mother’s anxiety should have alerted me to their suspicions. Finally, I recovered with no real after- effects. It was only years later that my mother confided that she and my father had feared my illness might have been polio.

I began a new school year, made new friends, played Little League. Another year passed without any news of Junior, until one day my mother came back from the drugstore with bad news. She had run into Junior’s mother who told her that Junior had been stricken by polio and was at the Warm Springs Institute, the very one we had learned about in class and seen pictures of promoting the “March of Dimes.”

This was not an era of shared emotions for parents and children. That the possibility might exist to visit my friend was never discussed. And, two years later we read in the Augusta newspaper that my friend with polio had come home -in an iron lung, a type of respirator that looked more like a coffin than a life- saving machine. More than this, I did not learn until another year had passed.

Tragically too late for my friend, the news came that a vaccine for polio had at last been discovered. Junior enjoyed another year of life, confined to crutches. He tried to return to the active life of a boy. Near Vashti was a kaolin mine. The surface excavation sites had been filled with water and they were “posted” to discourage boys who wished to swim there. This of course was not enough dissuading for any red-blooded boy.  I learned, again from a newspaper article, Junior had drowned while swimming in a kaolin mine pond, just out of reach of his friends.  I have kept a newspaper clipping about this tragedy for a lifetime. No vaccine could erase the sense of loss I have carried. It is a reminder that the death of a child-any child – changes all that follows, for family, for friends. Inevitably, what seems too tragic to discuss has to be talked about, must find expression, if we are to release the burden of old pains. So I have written this.