A pandemic past

My earliest memory of my father is at an oil-drilling rig somewhere near McAlester, Oklahoma. It was late 1954 and I was less than two years old.

My mother pulled our late-‘40s black Plymouth to within a hundred feet or so of the rig. We got out and my mother took me in her arms and started walking toward the metal tower. I am a little unclear on why we had driven to see him, maybe to take him his lunch. Anyway, he had seen us and was already walking toward us.

The picture of him striding to meet us, neatly dressed (despite the oily environment) in khakis – shirt and pants – has remained in my mind since that day. Not just because it is my earliest memory of him but also because it is the only recollection I have of him walking, on his own, without support.

Not long after that day this tall, strong and healthy man would be flat on his back, paralyzed by polio and being kept alive inside by what was called an iron lung – akin in function to what is called a ventilator today. At first, he had thought it was the flu and consented to seeing a doctor only after it got a lot worse.

I was told much later that doctors, for a while, had not expected him to live. He did live and when he was finally discharged from the hospital the same doctors thought he would never get out of his wheelchair.

He was nothing if not tough. Within a year or two he was up and walking with the aid of a pair of aluminum crutches. He would walk with those crutches and lower leg braces for the rest of his life He converted the wheelchair into a feed cart that he could lean on and push through the aisles while feeding the birds in a large chicken house he maintained for a few years.

Today’s coronavirus and the poliomyelitis virus are obviously very different diseases: coronavirus seems to begin as a respiratory illness that does kill victims in a small percentage of cases. Those who recover in most cases appear able to return to their normal lives. Polio starts in the gastrointestinal tract and in a relatively small percentages of cases migrates to the central nervous system where it can kill or, as with my father, cause varying degrees of lifelong paralysis.

When I was about four years old the Salk vaccine became available. I went with my father and younger brother to get the vaccine at the elementary school in Trinity, Texas. We stood in a long line to each receive a small paper cup with a single sugar cube inside. As my father stood there on his crutches he joked that it probably would not hurt him to take the vaccine, so he did, and that was the end of my family’s battle with polio. Or at least it was the end of the beginning of that struggle.

My father was about 38 years old when he contracted polio, rather old for that disease. It was more common among children and it took a toll among the young people in Trinity although I don’t remember any fatalities. There were in a short time a number of kids rolling about in wheelchairs or walking on crutches. My parents, especially considering my father’s infection, were terrified that my younger brother, my older sister and I would fall ill. With the vaccine and possibly the luck of the draw, we were spared.

My father lived with polio for the next 35 years; he was never able to take more than a couple of steps without the crutches. As I said, polio and the coronavirus have little in common but the current pandemic reminds me of those days in the 1950s.

Rock ‘n roll was huge in the last half of that decade and I loved it, but in my family a microscopic organism also held enormous sway.