In the 1950’s, TV was fast becoming a babysitter for working moms, or even moms who wanted a break. Red Ryder and Little Beaver, his Indian Boy sidekick and sneaky informer, were a personal favorite, taken from the comic book about this auburn-haired cowboy.  At one point I made it up that Little Beaver lived over my bedroom with his [...]

A year or so after a kindergarten boy held me up against the play yard wall with his big tummy, I was still enduring his taunts and bullying.  One afternoon after school another little girl and I were waiting on the steps outside for our mothers to pick us up.  It strikes me that today it would be unusual for [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]