The 1955 was the year of the polio epidemic in the greater United States . Not only was it crippling, but it was life threatening. As soon as school started, we would begin collecting money for the “March of Dimes”. I remember bringing these small cards home from school. They had little indentations in them similar to books coin collectors use. When all the little spots were filled with dimes, you returned it to school.
The years 1954 and 1955 were seriously traumatic years for my mother. Consequently, that means they were traumatic years for me too. At the tail end of 1953, on November 20th my Uncle Bob and my Aunt Margaret were involved in a rear-end automobile accident. Aunt Margaret had the glove compartment door open, looking inside of it for something. The accident happened in the 700 block of East Main in Ottumwa, IA. Uncle Bob said he was driving in front of Stringer oil station when cars ahead of him stopped. Then when he put on his brakes his car skidded on the blacktop pavement. His car collided with the rear of a car driven by a man from Cedar.
They had been grocery shopping and Aunt Margaret turned to grab for the sack of groceries in the back seat, fearing the eggs were going to slide off and break. The impact threw my Aunt Margaret into the dash of the car. The open glove box door rammed into her back. Aunt Margaret was taken to the Ottumwa Hospital in shock, and there it was learned she had ruptured her liver.
Aunt Margaret was probably my mom’s very best friend in the world at the time. Aunt Margaret had served as her Maid of Honor at her wedding. Aunt Margaret survived two surgeries, 70 blood transfusions, and the birth of her baby son, Kenny Lee, before succumbing on April 7 th , 5 months later. My mother was pretty devastated. She was also very superstitious. Mom had it in her head that tragedies come in threes, and she was waiting for the next tragedy to strike. Because death is a part of the life cycle, of course, eventually this superstition was going to be self-fulfilling.
In the fall of 1955 my cousin, Bobby, (Aunt Margaret’s oldest son) and I attended a birthday party for another six year old playmate of ours, Bobby Glen Adams, who was just turning 7, and was a 2 nd grader at Horace Mann school in Ottumwa at the time. It was a fun day. I remember guessing how many items were in a glass jar and winning a fistful of change. We played games like Pin the Tail on the Donkey, and Musical Chairs, and Bingo. I ate so much sweet stuff (why people feed kids ice cream and cake and pop all at one sitting I’ll never know) I got sick to my stomach.
Bobby Glen got a beautiful new tricycle for his birthday. He was so excited. A couple of weeks later on a Sunday he rode the bicycle over an embankment at his house and the handlebar rammed him in the side on impact. At first, it didn’t seem like he was seriously hurt. However, he was worse on Monday and was taken to the hospital. An operation disclosed he had a severe tear in his liver. Bobby Glen died on Wednesday following the surgery. I was six years old, attending a seven year old’s funeral, somebody I’d been laughing and giggling and running and playing with a couple of weeks before. Of course, my mother counted Bobby Glen as the second death in her death trilogy superstition.
This was a wicked superstition to be haunting anybody when a polio epidemic was raging across the United States at the time. My mother was living in stark raving terror that something was going to happen to me or my sister. It didn’t help matters that another close friend of hers had a six year old daughter seriously ill with a rare inherited kidney disease. Norma Diedrick was a close play mate of mine when she was reasonably healthy. We were in Mrs. Troeger’s first grade class together at Stuart School . Mrs. Troeger was a small petite woman with short sandy brown hair. As I recall, even though Norma was on our first grade roster, I don’t think her mother, Katie, ever sent her to school that year. I at least started the year despite the national polio epidemic and the string of unfortunate incidents haunting my mother.
Aunt Margaret had died. Bobby Glen had died. Norma was sick and doctors had little to no hope she would survive, and almost on a daily basis somebody’s child in Ottumwa, IA was being diagnosed with mild to serious cases of polio. Often, when victims were first coming down with the dreaded polio, they experienced symptoms similar to a cold with a headache, chills a slight fever and fatigue. Some might not even know they had the disease if it was mild enough. Others, however, experienced extreme pain and muscle paralysis. It was particularly frightening if it affected the muscles that controlled breathing and if symptoms were this severe many patients wound up in an iron lung.
My mother couldn’t take any more. She called the school and told them she was afraid to send me to school for fear I would catch polio. I was six years old and weighed a whopping 28 pounds at the time, so I’m pretty sure I looked frail and fragile to my poor, stressed out mother. I remember her refusing to allow the doctor to give me a smallpox vaccination at the time.
Finally Mrs. Troeger, at my mother’s request, out of desperation I was never going to learn to read, sent a Dick and Jane primer to my mother. Mom copied it into a three ring notebook. She used this notebook to tutor me in reading for the rest of my first grade school year. I’m pretty sure I never went back to school that year.
Sometime in that school year polio vaccines were finally available. Jonas Salk’s killed virus vaccine was being administered in certain places by the summer of 1955. It was a three shot process at the time. It turned out that a second and third shot were required to build up an immunity to the disease. Salk’s vaccine finally brought an end to the epidemic, but it took quite a while before it was administered nationwide. I don’t remember what time of year we got the vaccine in Ottumwa, IA. I do seem to remember being part of a long line of children at Evans Junior High School where the vaccines were being given. I did receive my inoculation along with everybody else.
My playmate, Norma Diedrick passed away some time during that 1955-1956 school year. Maybe this, along with a summer spent in sunshine, the summer of 1956, maybe these things laid my mother’s panic to rest. I just know that in the fall of 1956 I started second grade along with my peers.