Polio Claims A Victim

    In 1947 an epidemic of Polio was claiming victims all over America and around the world.  I was two years, nearly three, when I contacted this dreaded disease.  This disease used to be called Infantile Paralysis, because the doctors thought that it was contacted only by children.  Later they found that people of all ages were struck by it.

     I was living on Highway 22 in Pendleton County, Kentucky, when I contacted Polio.  My family and I lived in a small house beside a grocery store that my grandfather ran along with my mother and father.

     One morning, my mother says, she called upstairs for me to come down to breakfast, but I said, "I cannot walk."  She tells me that I was such a "jokester" that she thought I was just joking.  She told my older brother, Vernon, to go upstairs and get me to come down.  When he did, he found that I really could not walk.

     After going to several doctors, the last one said, "Take him to the hospital; I don't know what is wrong with him."  At the General Hospital (now University Hospital) in Cincinnati, they found that I had contacted Polio.   Later I was transferred to  St. Elizabeth Hospital in Covington, Kentucky, and received treatment there until I left home at age 17 to go to business college in Lexington, Kentucky. 

 
My father is standing beside me in this picture
taken in 1951 at St. Elizabeth Hospital
in Covington, Kentucky, after surgery
on my back and leg.

    Many have asked me if I was in an iron lung, but I do not remember specifically being in one.  I have, however, seen many of them.  If you have never seen one, you would be surprised at their threatening size and shape.