Past crises brought change. What will this pandemic bring?

Jerry Apps was pulling his sled home from his one-room country school in rural Wisconsin on a January afternoon in 1947 when he started to feel ill. Within days his family knew it was polio, the worst public health threat in American communities of the postwar era.

While his father helped him largely regain use of his legs, there was no more basketball, baseball, track, or helping his folks on the farm.

He grappled with worthlessness throughout his childhood, he says. But at the urging of a teacher, he joined a typewriting class. He was the only boy and says he excelled because his fingers were strong from milking cows. Another teacher, recognizing his suffering on the sidelines of the sports he loved, urged him to