Polio and Other Dirty Words from the 1950s

I recently looked at some comic books from the 1950s, a trip way, way back down memory lane. Some were the kind of horror comics that attracted the unhappy attention of the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency in the early 1950s. But, it was in the adventures of Heckle and Jeckle (two crafty black birds, magpies, specifically, who were not racist, despite some rumors, but who did share a bed) that I found the true horror on this page. (Do follow that link.)

To you, it may be a simple public service announcement, but it struck something deep within this survivor of a childhood in the 1950s. It was a page of precautions about infantile paralysis, or polio, one of the dirtiest words of the 1950s, ranking with fallout and outside agitator (my 1950s childhood was spent in the south).

I never knew but one person with polio, back before we dadburn liberals (a word that became dirty to some a few years later, a word I'm proud to identify myself with; McCarthyism is one of my dirty 1950s words) got the goofy idea of mainsteaming sick and handicapped children, not keeping them shut up out of sight, out of mind.

Because a much larger student was harrassing my friend, I came as close to getting into a fight as I ever did in all my school days. For purposes of full disclosure, I must say that that much larger student was... a girl. (But, she was such a big girl.)

It surprises me even more that the word polio would have such an impact on me, because another disease, a disease that my family and I had never even heard of, struck us at the beginning of the 1960s, and, in some ways, still has not turned us loose. Maybe naming a thing makes it more terrible, and as I said, we did not even know the name of our disease until it claimed us.

Polio was named so often. It was everyone's disease. We kids collected coins - remember the March of Dimes? The frenzy about polio always intensified in the summers, when we longed to seek cool refuge in the swimming pool, which we were told was crawling with whatever little critters cause polio.

Later, to save us from swimming with them (remember, my childhood was spent in the south), the pool was closed, filled in, about the time the chairs were taken out of the public library. By Gawd, them outside agitators might make us share the library with them, but no one was going to make us sit with them.

There was always the threat of the Bomb (a dirty word if some other country had it, a blessing if the United States had it). Yes, we actually practiced hiding from the fallout under our desks.

At the end of the fifties, we faced the fact that the next president would not be safe, old paternal Ike (where I grew up, everyone liked Ike, who would fly in for golf in our neck of the woods), but would be a handsome, young (gasp) Yankee. Then at my church, talk turned dirty indeed.

Since our school was so close to two major military installations, we were told, them commies (dirty word alert) had our specific classroom in their crosshairs. Our pastor told us that since our church was committed to telling the truth, just as soon as that handsome, young Cath-er-lic became president, the Pope was going to send his legions to shut down our church and haul our pastor away in chains. None of them ever attended, by the way. Eleven o'clock on Sunday morning is still the most segregated hour in the United States.

But, there were some good words. Science, usually was a good word, and so was space exploration, although it always seemed dirty to send a dog into space to die alone and unfed.

Science, in fact, gave us a word, the name of a scientist, that started off dirty for me: another shot! I never was a fan of needles (how strange that I would later go to acupuncture school). But that word, that name, soon changed, because that name was Jonas Salk, the scientist who discovered a vaccine against polio.

Looking back to that long ago time, even in the company of two cartoon magpies (and, inevitably, with a parrot on my shoulder), I realize that science never found a vaccine for the fear and bigotry that continue to be epidemics in our society, half a century later.

Still, on April 12th, join me as I pause to remember how human history changed, how human life improved, on April 12, 1955, when Dr. Salk's vaccine was announced.

Sources: personal experience.