The crippled girl dances, skips and learns about mean kids
Early childhood was full of ups and downs for me, perhaps in a more extreme way than for normal kids. On 1950’s evening TV, there was Your Hit Parade, with Gisele MacKenzie (what a name!), Snooky Lanson, Dorothy Collins, and Tommy Lionetti, and eventually there was the Ed Sullivan Show. I loved music and movies, and looked forward to my [...]
Crip shoes
For girls in the 50’s, a Buster Brown nightmare; for women, not your Ferragamos or Jimmy Choos. Shoes were expensive as I grew up. By the time I was a teenager, one foot was a woman’s size five and the other a child’s one or two. We bought two pair and threw out or stockpiled the odd pairs I could [...]
Even polio kids get vaccinated
When I was six, and a kindergartener who'd had a bout of polio three years previously, the small California town where we were living was one of many participating in the spring 1954 polio vaccination trials. I was lined up in the dark hallway of the old brick school with maybe a hundred other kids, but I didn’t know until [...]
You can’t be grateful for something you don’t know you have
It was decades after polio treatment before I fully appreciated the value of what the amazing rehab people did with me in therapy, or the emotional toll my affliction must have taken on my mother. I was a three-year-old simply doing what I was told to do, and in my future childhood years, I just got up, put on the [...]
Mama and the physical therapists
In 1998, I found a letter my mother (who died in 1993) wrote to my father when I was learning to walk again. He was in northern California looking for a home delivery milk route to buy while I was in the polio hospital in Santa Monica in 1951. I believe that this was so that we could get out [...]
Hospital food
I was in a rehab hospital for polio treatment in Santa Monica, CA, for six months, after an initial isolation stay of two weeks in a small tiled room in a general hospital in Los Angeles. The isolation period was heartbreaking for a three-year-old. My parents could not touch me and stopped coming to see me so that I, and [...]
What is polio, how do you get it, and what’s it like when you do?
This first blog post will be the facts about polio, not my personal story. Usually I will give you more story than data, but this is basic background FYI stuff about which people usually ask. Although I do not clearly remember in entirety my own battery of polio symptoms at age three, in that fateful year of 1951, what is [...]