An unknown deadly diseas

San Angelo is in West Texas. The county seat between Abilene and the Mexican border. Farms, oil wells, and cattle ranches fenced with barbed wire dot the county. Blessed with a warm climate and reputation as a healthy place to live, in one year San Angelo added to its reputation in ways that city leaders dreaded.*

In mid-spring, the newspaper reported that a local child had come down with a viral disease that had occurred in earlier springs like hailstorms and tornadoes. Previously, when this disease occurred, it had not spread. This one, however, did.

Parents began arriving at Shannon Memorial Hospital with “feverish, aching youngsters in their arms,” the local newspaper reported. Within days these children died: 10 month-old Esperanza Ramirez, seven year-old Billie Doyle Kleghorn, four year-old Susan Barr, and others. The city health officer said that an epidemic was occurring. Because the disease had no known cause or prevention or cure, he recommended that San Angelo children avoid crowds, wash their hands regularly, and get a lot of rest.

A month later, with known cases spiking to over 60, the city council voted to close all indoor meeting places, including theaters and churches. Tourists stopped coming to the city. The economy shrank. One local doctor said, “We got to the point … when people would not even shake hands.”

The year is 1949, not 2020. The disease is polio, not Covid-19.

I got polio in 1944, five years before the epidemic hits San Angelo. But I was lucky. I came out of the disease with only a limp from a destroyed calf muscle. Amid the fears of the coronavirus today, I can now appreciate in a way that I could not as a ten years-old, the dread of the unknown consequences for their son that my parents had after I came down with the “plague” as it was called at the time.

Like polio at that time, the coronavirus has no known cause, testing for the disease continues to be slow and hampered globally. There are no medications or vaccine. Even the death rate from the disease is uncertain because of flaws in testing and tardiness in evaluating large numbers of people in China and other countries as the epidemic becomes a pandemic. Political and medical officials advise Americans to wash their hands often and stay away from crowds. Anxieties and fears are as contagious as the disease’s spread from its origins in China to the rest of the world.

Now as an old man, the fear I have of the coronavirus striking my family, friends, and the nation must be close to what my parents must have felt when I got polio three-quarters of a century ago.

Polio virus

Known for centuries but isolated in the early 1900s, the virus had triggered epidemics across the world. What caused children and adults to sicken, become paralyzed and die–the disease was often called “infantile paralysis”–was unknown. Thus, prevention was useless. Fear of contagion was rampant wherever cases broke out. There were no medications. Treatment was a combination of muscle wrappings and massage of limbs to ease damage to the body that inevitably occurred.

In the U.S. it occurred periodically paralyzing children and adults, rich and poor alike. One epidemic in 1916 claimed 27,000 Americans. In New York alone there were 8400 cases and 2400 deaths. Five years later, Franklin Delano Roosevelt came down with the disease at the age of 39 and wore leg braces for the rest of his life including the years he served as President of the U.S. (1933-1945). Not until the early 1950s did a vaccine become available for children.**

The polio epidemic of 1944 swept across Pittsburgh. I caught it. I remember well the weeks I was in the hospital and the months that I was at home. I recall the anxiety and fears that my parents and brothers had–I was the youngest in the family–since the paralysis could cause loss of breathing (“iron lungs” were invented to keep children and adults alive) and destroy muscles. Both of my brothers had been drafted–it was the third year of World War II–and were serving in the U.S. Navy and Air Force. My parents worried about them and now I came down with polio. Friends and neighbors steered clear of our home.

Most vivid of all I remember my mother massaging my legs with cocoa butter in the hospital. I could not walk after I returned home. Daily she would rub my legs with it. I missed junior high school for a few months and when I returned I had a noticeable limp. The smell of cocoa butter has remained fixed in my head ever since.

So too have I remembered drinking raw eggs every morning before I went to junior high school. Because my leg muscles and body wasted during confinement for polio in the hospital and at home, doctors had told my parents that I needed proteins to rebuild muscle strength. So my father every morning before he would go to work would crack open two eggs and put them in a small glass, stir them into one yellow blob and watch as I drank it. I shivered at the taste. This went on for months until I regained weight and could walk and run, albeit slowly.

My guess is that the fears my parents had that I would die went away slowly as I began to walk and returned to school in 1945. With the end of World War II, my brothers came home. I was getting strong enough to bowl, play baseball, and basketball. As I think back to that time 75 years ago, I can imagine their fears for me as I and uncounted millions of families now face Covid-19.

Covid-19

Like many Americans of my generation, I stay at home a lot, talk on the phone, text, and stay away from crowds. I do fist bumps with family and friends, wash my hands often, watch as cancellations of schools, conferences, sporting events, and entertainment venues pile up. Am I fearful and anxious? Yes. Do I keep my fingers crossed that the virus runs its course and disappears? You can bet on that.

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The Unknown Virus: A Personal Story
San Angelo is in West Texas. The county seat between Abilene and the Mexican border. Farms, oil wells, and cattle ranches fenced with barbed wire dot the county. Blessed with a warm climate and reputation as a healthy place to live, in one year San Angelo added to its reputation in ways that city leaders dreaded.*

In mid-spring, the newspaper reported that a local child had come down with a viral disease that had occurred in earlier springs like hailstorms and tornadoes. Previously, when this disease occurred, it had not spread. This one, however, did.

Parents began arriving at Shannon Memorial Hospital with “feverish, aching youngsters in their arms,” the local newspaper reported. Within days these children died: 10 month-old Esperanza Ramirez, seven year-old Billie Doyle Kleghorn, four year-old Susan Barr, and others. The city health officer said that an epidemic was occurring. Because the disease had no known cause or prevention or cure, he recommended that San Angelo children avoid crowds, wash their hands regularly, and get a lot of rest.

A month later, with known cases spiking to over 60, the city council voted to close all indoor meeting places, including theaters and churches. Tourists stopped coming to the city. The economy shrank. One local doctor said, “We got to the point … when people would not even shake hands.”

The year is 1949, not 2020. The disease is polio, not Covid-19.

I got polio in 1944, five years before the epidemic hits San Angelo. But I was lucky. I came out of the disease with only a limp from a destroyed calf muscle. Amid the fears of the coronavirus today, I can now appreciate in a way that I could not as a ten years-old, the dread of the unknown consequences for their son that my parents had after I came down with the “plague” as it was called at the time.

Like polio at that time, the coronavirus has no known cause, testing for the disease continues to be slow and hampered globally. There are no medications or vaccine. Even the death rate from the disease is uncertain because of flaws in testing and tardiness in evaluating large numbers of people in China and other countries as the epidemic becomes a pandemic. Political and medical officials advise Americans to wash their hands often and stay away from crowds. Anxieties and fears are as contagious as the disease’s spread from its origins in China to the rest of the world.

Now as an old man, the fear I have of the coronavirus striking my family, friends, and the nation must be close to what my parents must have felt when I got polio three-quarters of a century ago.

Polio virus

Known for centuries but isolated in the early 1900s, the virus had triggered epidemics across the world. What caused children and adults to sicken, become paralyzed and die–the disease was often called “infantile paralysis”–was unknown. Thus, prevention was useless. Fear of contagion was rampant wherever cases broke out. There were no medications. Treatment was a combination of muscle wrappings and massage of limbs to ease damage to the body that inevitably occurred.

In the U.S. it occurred periodically paralyzing children and adults, rich and poor alike. One epidemic in 1916 claimed 27,000 Americans. In New York alone there were 8400 cases and 2400 deaths. Five years later, Franklin Delano Roosevelt came down with the disease at the age of 39 and wore leg braces for the rest of his life including the years he served as President of the U.S. (1933-1945). Not until the early 1950s did a vaccine become available for children.**

The polio epidemic of 1944 swept across Pittsburgh. I caught it. I remember well the weeks I was in the hospital and the months that I was at home. I recall the anxiety and fears that my parents and brothers had–I was the youngest in the family–since the paralysis could cause loss of breathing (“iron lungs” were invented to keep children and adults alive) and destroy muscles. Both of my brothers had been drafted–it was the third year of World War II–and were serving in the U.S. Navy and Air Force. My parents worried about them and now I came down with polio. Friends and neighbors steered clear of our home.

Most vivid of all I remember my mother massaging my legs with cocoa butter in the hospital. I could not walk after I returned home. Daily she would rub my legs with it. I missed junior high school for a few months and when I returned I had a noticeable limp. The smell of cocoa butter has remained fixed in my head ever since.

So too have I remembered drinking raw eggs every morning before I went to junior high school. Because my leg muscles and body wasted during confinement for polio in the hospital and at home, doctors had told my parents that I needed proteins to rebuild muscle strength. So my father every morning before he would go to work would crack open two eggs and put them in a small glass, stir them into one yellow blob and watch as I drank it. I shivered at the taste. This went on for months until I regained weight and could walk and run, albeit slowly.

My guess is that the fears my parents had that I would die went away slowly as I began to walk and returned to school in 1945. With the end of World War II, my brothers came home. I was getting strong enough to bowl, play baseball, and basketball. As I think back to that time 75 years ago, I can imagine their fears for me as I and uncounted millions of families now face Covid-19.

Covid-19

Like many Americans of my generation, I stay at home a lot, talk on the phone, text, and stay away from crowds. I do fist bumps with family and friends, wash my hands often, watch as cancellations of schools, conferences, sporting events, and entertainment venues pile up. Am I fearful and anxious? Yes. Do I keep my fingers crossed that the virus runs its course and disappears? You can bet on that.

Just like my mother and father in 1944 and those parents in San Angelo in 1949 who faced the unknown when their children caught the polio virus, mothers and fathers today concerned about their children and elderly parents contracting the coronavirus, the past has become the present right before our eyes.

Today, I can still smell that cocoa butter. And I do not like eggs very much even when they are scrambled.

*For the description of San Angelo, Texas and the 1949 polio epidemic, I used David Oshinsky, Polio: An American Story (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 1-4.

**Ibid., pp. 19-23.

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Jerry Heverly on March 12, 2020 at 10:22 am
I remember standing in line in the 4th grade to get my shot. Dr. Salk appeared on TV a lot in the 50’s, hailed, justifiably, as a hero. I could see how narrowly I avoided the disease when I met my fraternity brother at Gettysburg –three years my senior–, who limped from his bout with the virus.

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larrycuban on March 12, 2020 at 6:25 pm
Jerry, appreciate your recollection of Salk shot and what it helped you avoid.

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Mansa Alphonse on March 16, 2020 at 2:27 am
Wow! Thank You for you vivid reflections. It seems every generation must face the reality that we forget how fragile life can be and often consumed by things that really don’t matter. It is my hope that we come out of this as a more humane society as even in these challenging times hatred is still feasting on many souls…

Reply
larrycuban on March 16, 2020 at 8:27 am
Thanks for taking the time to comment.

Ann Staley on March 12, 2020 at 10:56 am
Larry, Your story is a frightening and amazing one. That you survived, that both your brothers returned from WWII, that Dr. Salk and others “found a cure.” I remember the shots, three of them, and didn’t feel grateful enough at the time. I still hate getting shots. I always imagine the doctor as running across the room with a needle pointed at my arm and jabbing me with something the size of a pole vault. This new virus we’re fighting across the world is a wake-up call for those of us who didn’t experience what you did, first-hand. Thank you for sharing your story.

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larrycuban on March 12, 2020 at 6:24 pm
Thanks, Ann, for taking the time to comment.

Reply
EB on March 12, 2020 at 1:01 pm
My first-grade classmates and I were “polio pioneers.” I believe in 1952. We were given the first Salk vaccine, experimentally, at school, to see whether it would prevent polio. Parents were more than happy to sign permission forms, because they were so afraid of the disease. They all had friends and relatives who, like you, limped or had other orthopedic disabilities. The vaccine did have a powerful preventive effect, and later versions were easier to use and had no risk of side effects (one version of the vaccine used a live virus, which in a few cases actually gave children polio).

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larrycuban on March 12, 2020 at 6:23 pm
Thanks for the comment on your experience with the Salk vaccine, Jane.

Reply
Reuben Rubio on March 13, 2020 at 10:13 am
Thank you very much for your thoughtful reflection. What we are going through now stirs me as well; one of my grandfathers was orphaned at a young age when both his parents died of the Spanish flu when that pandemic reached its fingers into the rurality of central New Mexico about a hundred years ago. Sometimes in our haste to control our environment, routines and plans, we forget that there will be bigger things that will impact our lives. Like you and your parents did, we just have to face those times with the courage and hope that I believe we were all endowed with by our Creator.

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larrycuban on March 13, 2020 at 11:22 am
And thank you, Reuben, for taking the time to comment about your grandfather’s experience with the Spanish Flu pandemic.

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Pingback: Larry Cuban Remembers the Unknown Virus That Terrified Children When He Was a Child | Diane Ravitch’s blog

larrycuban on March 16, 2020 at 8:26 am
Thanks, Diane, for re-blogging post.

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Pingback: 6 Things Educators Can Do From Home To Help Their Students | International Education News

FuzzYdicE on March 16, 2020 at 2:22 pm
Scary times. You did a great job covering it. But there are opportunities here.

I wrote about them recently. Got to make the most out of what we are dealt. Everything has trade offs, some more immediate.

Thanks for sharing!

Reply
larrycuban on March 16, 2020 at 4:42 pm
Thanks for taking the time to comment.

Reply
Fred (Au Natural) on March 16, 2020 at 2:48 pm
I had a friend who died a few years ago of post-polio syndrome. He was born late enough that the vaccine was available but early enough that it was still a significant risk. His parents declined the vaccine because they didn’t believe in it.

I am very glad that COVID-19 is NOT polio. It is the old farts like me who will have to worry the most. If you are going to have an epidemic, that is how it should be.

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larrycuban on March 16, 2020 at 4:41 pm
Hadn’t thought of it the way you have, Fred. Thanks for commenting.

Reply
Phil Strawn on March 16, 2020 at 3:30 pm
Fort Worth, Texas, went through a similar outbreak in the mid-fifties. I have two cousins that contracted the virus. One lived in Santa Anna, Texas, about 60 miles from San Angelo, and the other in Fort Worth. They both survived with limps and wore leg braces for a year or so. Those were scary times for families.

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larrycuban on March 16, 2020 at 4:40 pm
Thanks, Phil, for your comment.

Reply
Cai on March 16, 2020 at 3:44 pm
Straights didn’t give a damn during Aids epidemic. Now an epidemic risks them, now we should all quiver.

Reply
larrycuban on March 16, 2020 at 4:40 pm
Thanks for taking the time to comment.

Reply
BillboardVagabond on March 16, 2020 at 3:46 pm
Much appreciated Larry even if I am replying from India. I fear for my parents who are well past their sixties and I did take my son for polio vaccine when he was due. Struck a chord. Thank you for the recollections with a bygone era though the virus still holds centrestage.

Reply
larrycuban on March 16, 2020 at 4:39 pm
Appreciate your commenting from afar.

Reply
Diadel Kimberlee on March 16, 2020 at 4:21 pm
Thank you for sharing your story of courage.

Reply
larrycuban on March 16, 2020 at 4:38 pm
Thanks for your comment.

Reply
larrycuban on March 16, 2020 at 4:42 pm
And thank you for commenting.

Reply
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