'American Experience: The Polio Crusade'

One of my earliest memories is of standing in line, in some sort of meeting hall, waiting to be given a sugar cube soaked in polio vaccine. Polio was all but eradicated in America by the time I actually knew what it was, but its cultural effects still resonated: I remember Gumby, the little clay boy, being put in an iron lung (used to help polio victims breathe) in one episode; it was one of the most disturbing images of my childhood. And there was the March of Dimes, into which we were enlisted as student-citizens, and whose origins are told in  “The Polio Crusade,” airing tonight as part of the PBS series "American Experience."

It's a neat, gripping social history of a disease that ranked behind only the atom bomb among midcentury American fears. Although it was not the most dreadful disease of its day -- paralysis was rare, and death very rare -- it played upon the public imagination as a despoiler of youth (and of the summertime, when it was most prevalent). Images here of very small children walking with leg braces and canes are still heartbreakingly potent.

-- Robert Lloyd

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Comments

[Rhoda Talso]

When I was a youngster in the 30's, I remember not being able to go to the movies or the swimming pool because of the fear of polio.
At one time, I was with my parents at my Grandparents in Ohio and developed a high fever. They took me back to Detroit to our pediatrician. By that time I was better. He thought perhaps I had had polio.
My best friend died of bubar polio in 1953.
In i954, I was teaching a 2nd grade in Berkely, Michigan when the parents of our school were asked for permission to have their children participate in a test of the Salk Vaccine. Some were injected with placebos. No mention of this was in your story.