A Test of Faith
GUIDEPOSTS celebrates its seventy-fifth anniversary this year. We’ve been looking back at stories that mark important events during those years, moments when America came together.
In the early fifties, polio was a national scourge. The epidemic peaked in 1952; there were nearly 58,000 cases, with more than 3,000 deaths and some 21,000 people left paralyzed, most of them children.
The next year, Jonas Salk announced his polio vaccine. The first volunteer to test it had been Bill Kirkpatrick, a teenage polio patient. (Someone who’d already contracted polio wouldn’t get the disease again if something went wrong.) In 1954, his father wrote
