We Made Peace with Polio

By Luther Robinson

Robinson was an elementary school principal who first watched his students and then his own children become stricken with polio during an epidemic in North Carolina in 1953.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barakaldo Books
• Release date: Oct 9, 2020
• ISBN: 9781839745973

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Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

WE MADE PEACE WITH POLIO

BY

LUTHER ROBINSON

And I will show that there is no imperfection in the present, and can be none in the future,

And I will show that whatever happens to anybody it may be turn’d to beautiful results,

And I will show that nothing can happen to anyone more beautiful than death,

And I will thread a thread through my poems that time and events are compact,

And that all the things of the universe are perfect miracles, each as profound as any.

WALT WHITMAN

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

DEDICATION 5

1.—GOLDEN DAYS REMEMBERED 6

2.—THE EPIDEMIC 9

3.—THE VACCINATING CENTER 13

4.—POLIO STRIKES AT HOME 18

5.—THE AMBULANCE RIDE 23

6.—TERROR IN THE NIGHT 27

7.—THE VOICE OF THE TELEPHONE 32

8.—IN THE IRON LUNG 37

9.—POLIO STRIKES AGAIN 41

10.—DEATH COMES AT DAWN 46

11.—IN THAT QUIET PLACE 50

12.—WAITING THE LONG SUMMER THROUGH 54

13.—A STORY TO TELL 59

14.—NO RETURN FOREVER 65

15.—VISITING A RESPIRATOR WARD 70

16.—TIME WAS RUNNING OUT 76

17.—BEYOND THE HIGHEST MOUNTAINS 81

18.—COMING HOME 87

19.—VOICES OF THE NIGHT 91

20.—AFTER MANY DAYS 95

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 99

DEDICATION

To

All who

Live in lonely places

1.—GOLDEN DAYS REMEMBERED

Destiny weaves its dark thread slowly, silently, and mysteriously, Sometimes the thread breaks or turns suddenly, and destiny then turns also, as on a moment of time. We then gather to ourselves all that is woven but continue to look upon the weaving with expectancy and hope. But dark fate has already laid its cold hand upon us, and we have not the wisdom or the knowledge that can teach us to understand why.

Spring came for us that year, as it had always come, with a burst of bloom, of leaf, and of wild bird song. The robins returned that year, also, and bobbed worms from the rich, dark lawns. Morning and evening they sang for us but became silent and moved away when nesting time came. The mockingbirds, as they had done for a dozen summers, remained behind and built their nests in our own apple tree. They delighted us with song that year as they flitted to and fro, often carrying their fluting mimicries upward high into the air.

All along the rolling Carolina foothills, on the sheltered side of the Blue Ridge Mountains, spring came early that year. Through our breakfast room windows we watched the redbud bursting into bloom and the delicate budding of oak, maple, and poplar, which slowly spread a mantle of rich green above the dark forest floor. Interspersed among the magic green of newborn leaves and the darker shade of the pine trees, the flowering dogwood covered the woodlands like a mist, showing white on hill and mountain. To the west the great mountains rose upward and stretched away and away into haunting distances where the blue and purple haze joined at the horizon with the eternal blue of the sky.

Lenoir, nestling at the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, is a sort of gateway between the mountains and the plains. It is the county seat of Caldwell County and boasts a population of a little more than ten thousand. Our home was about a mile to the south, on a wooded hill several hundred feet higher than the town itself, overlooking the broad countryside. On a clear day, from where we lived, we could see the distinct features of Grandfather’s face etched against the western sky.

Like many other parents nearing the age of fifty, Mildred and I looked out upon the world in the spring of 1953 with expectancy and hope, mostly through the eyes of our two children. Though Mildred had been in delicate health for many years, she had recently undergone a successful operation that gave promise of greater strength in the future. I had almost forgotten what it was like to be well, she said.

But now, I never felt better in my life. And daily she went about her duties at home with singing in her heart, glad in the thought of having the children home for the summer, and planning eagerly for their return to college that fall.

Our children were grown girls that year. Anita was twenty-one years old and Alta nineteen. Anita was a girl of medium size and height, but because she always stood tall and straight, she seemed to be a little taller. Her light auburn hair was thin spun and always well kept, and when the light reflected upon it, you would think it was golden, Anita had the most unusual gray eyes you ever saw. At times they appeared to be brown, but when she smiled and her eager spirit shone through them, you would think they were blue.

Anita finished high school in Lenoir in the spring of 1950 and that fall went away to study at Mars Hill Junior College near the city of Asheville. She had always planned to get a college education, but she could not decide whether she would become a teacher or a newspaper reporter, for often she thought she would become a missionary. Motivated by some spirit of dedication, she always said that at the proper time some door would open to her and she would enter it and find fulfilment.

Anita’s first year at Mars Hill, by all acceptable standards of measurement, was a happy and successful one. She made the Dean’s list easily in the fall semester and again in the spring. But during the spring of her second year she became ill and returned home before the school year ended.

In the fall of 1952 Anita entered Meredith College in Raleigh, but again because of illness, she withdrew in about a month and returned home for the winter. At Christmas time, having recovered from her illness, she became secretary to the Reverend Mr. M. O. Owens, Jr., pastor of the First Baptist Church in Lenoir. She intended to return to college that fall, but the thread of destiny turned quickly when polio struck, and a door never opened for her.

Though younger and not quite so tall as Anita, Alta was a little larger. Her eager gay spirit was motivated by an inexhaustible vivacious energy. Her easy, outgoing spirit never knew a stranger. She had dark brown hair, as brown as her eyes, and her eyes were two great pools of light, mirroring innocence, wonder, and mischievous surprise.

When Alta finished high school in the spring of 1952, she went away from home for the first time. To earn money to help with her college education she took a job for the summer as a waitress in the Mayview Manor Hotel at Blowing Hock. Anita’s illness and her mother’s operation the year before had all but depleted the family treasury, and Alta was determined to help replenish it. And it was always a joke about the house that Alta saved whatever part of her earnings she set her mind to and borrowed her spending money from me. But it was all in the family, we agreed, and let it go at that.

We saw very little of Alta that summer. She spent only one night at home in early September and then went away to school at Woman’s College at Greensboro. Her first choice had always been Wake Forest College, where I had attended school, but the one-hundred-thirty-year-old college was then in the process of being moved from its location in Wake County near Raleigh to a new location in Winston-Salem, and Alta would transfer there in her junior year.

Alta spent but one year at Woman’s College. In the spring of 1953 she made application for admission to Wake Forest, saying that she wanted to be one of the last students at the old college and the first at the new. And I remember her best as she appeared the day she received approval of her application. She had gone across the lawn and the street to the mailbox, and she hurried back toward the house with an open letter in her hand, glancing at the letter, then the house, walking eagerly. In a moment she burst into the room, waving the letter in her hand. Something good has happened to me! she exclaimed. Guess what it is!

Probably a letter from some boy you met while away in school, I said, hardly sharing her warm enthusiasm.

Not this time, Daddy, Alta exclaimed, as she proudly exhibited the approved application for me to see.

The decision Alta made that morning also called for the making of another, and both together probably helped to turn the course of her destiny that summer. Because she was going much farther away from home to school that fall, Alta wished suddenly that she might spend one other summer at home with the family. And she decided that day not to return to her work in Blowing Rock but would take instead the job offered her in Lenoir as clerk in the office of the Blue Ridge Electric Company.

And with the family all together again, this should be our best summer, Anita added quickly. And to this we all agreed, for we had often said that parents and children see but very little of each other when once the children have finished high school.

And when Daddy finishes with his school work, he can teach us all to drive the car this summer, Alta added, meaning herself, Anita, and her mother. And I pity him.

Don’t pity me, I replied. But we should all pity instead the fenders of the old Chevrolet.

But the summer that was to be our best one ended for us almost before it began. For Alta’s plans, made so eagerly and hopefully that day, became only the means of throwing herself into the path of polio, which was already spreading like wildfire across Caldwell County.

2.—THE EPIDEMIC

Polio came early to Caldwell County that year. Beginning in isolated rural areas, scattered cases began to appear before the winter had passed, chiefly among younger children. By early spring it had spread out into other sections and became a grim reminder of other polio epidemics that had swept over the county in previous years, notably the one in 1944 which covered a wide area of piedmont Carolina, overtaxing the then available hospital facilities in Asheville, Charlotte, and Greensboro. That was the year that emergency hospital facilities were hurriedly established in the nearby city of Hickory. These later became known far and wide as the Miracle of Hickory.

Polio reappeared in Caldwell County in epidemic force in 1948 and again in 1950, but no polio epidemic had ever occurred in the serious proportions of the one in 1953.

The record of polio in Caldwell County might be seen that year on a map in Dr. William Happer’s office in the Health Department. Dots and names located the towns and villages, and large and small lines the highways and streams. A heavy line represented the Yadkin River that flowed along the northeast, and another line located the Catawba on the west and south. Spreading out from Lenoir in the center, the largest town and the county seat, the highway lines looked like a giant spiderweb. Toward the north appeared the names of some of the highest mountain peaks, among them the mile-high, lordly Grandfather. Appropriate symbols designated the national forests, and red lines divided the county into voting precincts.

Interspersed among the names, lines, and symbols on the map were groupings of round-headed pins, about the size of peas, some white and others red. The red pins represented the cases of polio in the current polio epidemic and the white pins those of previous years. Widely dispersed or mingled together, these white and red pins appeared singly on the map or in groups of two’s and three’s. Occasionally one might notice a little cluster of red pins near a line representing a busy highway, a white group near a little town, or maybe a cluster of the two colors together near a stream or a valley in the higher mountain regions.

There never seemed to be any meaningful grouping of the pins, though Dr. Happer often looked for one. With a long ruler and with Lenoir as the center, he drew a north-south line and counted the pins in either section. Likewise, he drew an east-west line and counted the pins again. A casual observer might have thought Dr. Happer was only playing some game he had learned when a boy in his native Scotland. Or perhaps he was practicing some game of war, using the colored pins to represent two opposing armies.

Dr. Happer’s map might well have been called the Battle of the Pins, and judging by the worried and troubled look upon his face, it was with him a serious matter. And well it might be, for Dr. Happer knew well the meaning of the white pins, as we would later know the meaning of the red. One of the white pins there represented his own son who was stricken with polio in previous years, but the two red pins that finally represented Anita and Alta on the map we never saw at all.

During the days and nights of that summer, calls came to hospitals, to doctors’ offices, and to the Health Department, asking for help. And one after another, wailing ambulances sped out of Lenoir, east, south, and west, carrying patients to polio hospitals in Greensboro, Charlotte, and Asheville. And with each new case of polio reported, Dr. Happer traced a line on the map and placed another red pin there until the red and white pins on the map looked like flowers blooming from the earth. Indeed, the one hundred forty-eight cases of polio in one year, out of a population of forty thousand people, might well