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Lowell Tuttle
NATIVE TEXAN
‘Bold leadership’ key to helping crush polio
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University of Pittsburgh Archives via AP
Dr. Jonas Salk, right, the Pittsburgh scientist who developed the polio vaccine, administers an injection to a boy in 1954.
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JOE HOLLEY
On a hot summer afternoon in the early 1950s, my cousin Jerry and his best friend Bobby were lounging around my uncle’s feed and seed store in downtown Waco. Maybe they were supposed to be working, but — hey, it was hot, and bulky sacks of cattle feed stacked in the boxcar on the nearby railroad siding could wait. The two 15-year-olds were among the best athletes in Waco that long-ago summer — Bobby Thomas, a blazing fast sprinter for the North Junior High Eagles track team; Jerry, a sprinter, hurdler and high-jumper, as well as running back on the Eagles football team.
As Jerry recalled years later, Bobby was lounging atop stacks of bagged cattle feed near the front windows that afternoon. “How come I’ve got a headache?” the youngster commented, rubbing his forehead.
“Aw, you probably got polio,” Jerry teased.
The boys laughed, even though both realized that polio in those postwar years was no laughing matter. A viral infection that ravaged the nation like a summer plague, it struck mainly children, killing or paralyzing close to 50,000 each year. Life magazine in 1949 described polio as the nation’s leading public health threat. The Saturday Evening Post labeled it “the most dreadful of youthful afflictions.”
My cousin Charles, Jerry’s younger brother, reminded me of what happened a few days after Bobby complained of his headache. “He and Jerry were supposed to come to my Little League game, but they didn’t show up,” he told me last week. “I didn’t know why.”
Charles found out later that Bobby’s parents had taken him to the doctor that afternoon because of the persistent headache. The diagnosis: Polio. The kid who once ran like the wind never walked again.
The coming COVID-19 vaccine is, of course, what reminded me of the postwar polio epidemic and the vaccine that came along a few years after Thomas was afflicted. With questions about possible parallels, I turned to historian David Oshinsky, author of “Polio: An American Story,” winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for history.
Oshinsky, a professor emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin and now director of Medical Humanities at New York University, begins his story in San Angelo in 1949. The West Texas town of 50,000 had nearly doubled in size during the war. Taking note of a booming economy and steady growth, the San Angelo Standard Times in 1949 predicted continued prosperity, in part because of the warm West Texas climate and “health-giving reputation.
“On May 20,” Oshinsky writes, “a small blot on this bright picture appeared.” The Standard Times report ed that a child had been diagnosed with polio. With in days, the local hospital confirmed 25 cases. Into the hot summer, the death toll mounted.
Worried parents, not knowing what caused the disease or who might get it kept their children inside. “Do you want to spend the rest of your life in an iron lung?” they’d ask their complaining kids. (My brothers and I heard that one when we begged to go swimming at the popular public pool outside the little town of West.)
In early June, 61 confirmed cases prompted the San Angelo City Council to close all indoor meeting places for a week. Movie theaters shut down; so did municipal swimming pools. Churches canceled services. Bars and bowling alleys barred their doors, and professional wrestling matches were canceled at Central High School. Tourist traffic bypassed San Angelo.
“Rumors spread about catching polio from an uncovered sneeze, from handling money, or from talking on the telephone,” Oshinsky writes. “‘We got to the point no one could comprehend,’ a local pediatrician noted, ‘when people would not even shake hands.’”
Nothing that doctors and public health officials tried seemed to work. By mid-June, polio patients filled more than half of the city’s 160 hospital beds; almost all were patients under 15. They faced life in a wheelchair, permanent confinement to an iron lung or death.
But then, it was over. The epidemic mysteriously peaked in July, and by late August the hospitals had emptied out.
San Angelo wasn’t the only city ravaged by polio in the summer of ’49. As Oshinsky notes, nearly 40,000 cases were reported in the United States, one for every 3,775 people. San Angelo had 420 cases, one for every 124 residents. Eighty-four people were permanently paralyzed; 28 died. “It was one of the most severe polio outbreaks ever recorded,” Oshinsky writes.
Decades later, on a balmy evening atop a bluff above the Pacific, just up the coast from San Diego, I found myself among an outdoor audience of 200 or so. We were listening to the guest of honor, a slender older man, bald on top with a fringe of unruly gray hair. He was wearing, if I remember correctly, white linen slacks and a guayabera. As he spoke, the distant roar of surf far below us resembled persistent applause.
Occasionally my attention wandered to his attractive, dark-haired wife. An accomplished painter, she had in years past been Pablo Picasso’s model and mistress, mother to two of his children. In 1970, she married the man who was, arguably, the most famous physician and scientist in the world.
Francoise Gilot’s husband was Dr. Jonas Salk, inventor of a vaccine that eliminated the threat of polio in the developed world. As Oshinsky details in his book, the crusade to defeat polio was funded, not by the federal government, but by a private charity, the March of Dimes. As we’ve learned since the onset of the pandemic, the process of developing an effective vaccine usually takes more than a decade, but the March of Dimes paved the way for the success of Salk’s killed-virus polio vaccine — in competition with Dr. Albert Sabin’s live-virus vaccine — in less than four years.
The Salk trials of 1954 remain the largest public health experiment in American history. More than 1 million schoolchildren, me included, participated. For years I kept a little card that designated my status as a “Polio Pioneer.”
We were given three shots over a period of a couple of months, receiving either the Salk vaccine or a placebo. (I have no idea what I got.) In that pre-computer age, it took a year to analyze the results. On April 25, 1955, headlines around the world shouted, “POLIO IS CONQUERED.”
Ignoring a letter from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover warning of Salk’s left-wing past, President Dwight D. Eisenhower invited the researcher to a Rose Garden ceremony at the White House. In a voice trembling with emotion, the grandfatherly president congratulated the 40-year-old scientist. “I have no words to thank you,” he said. “I am very, very happy.”
Oshinsky writes that famed broadcaster Edward R. Murrow asked Salk who owned the patent on the vaccine. “Well, the people, I would say,” Salk answered. “There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?”
The battle against polio has lessons for today. It’s a story of “bold leadership,” Oshinsky writes, an expression of “the steady faith of post-World War II American society in the progress of American medicine and technology, and in the certainty of what one observer has called ‘the old Yankee virtues of knowhow and can-do.’”
The triumph over polio came too late for Bob L. Thomas of Waco, but the disease hardly slowed him down. He graduated from high school three years after polio left him wheelchair-bound and then went on to graduate first in his class at Baylor University Law School. He served two terms in the Texas House of Representatives, served as McLennan County Judge and as Justice of the 10th Court of Appeals.
During his time in the Legislature, Thomas wrote the Texas Architectural Barriers bill. Signed into law in 1969, his bill set standards and specifications for buildings constructed with the aid of public funds. Builders had to assure that elderly and handicapped people had easy access.
The Waco lawyer, lawmaker and judge died in 1996 at age 58. Those who knew his life story remarked that young Bobby Thomas got bumped off the track early on, but Judge Bob Thomas never quit the race, polio be damned. djholley10@gmail.com twitter.com/h
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