When I elected to have a much-needed surgery to correct my paralyzed polio ankle at age thirteen, I had a choice, because I was on the cusp of adulthood, of being in the children’s ward or the adult ward of the hospital in Sacramento.  The operation was going to keep me from rolling my inner ankle bone toward the floor [...]

There were many times, as a child (and there have been as many as an adult), when a child approached me, often one I had never even met, to tell me, “You’re crippled.”  And then would stand there and look at me, into my eyes or down at my leg, as if to say, “I’ve made this observation,” or “My [...]

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 [...]