The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid_ A Memoir - Bill Bryson [84]
But even by the strange, elastic standards of the time, my parents were singularly unfathomable when it came to worry. As far as I can tell, they didn’t fear a thing, even the perils that other people really did worry about. Take polio. Polio had been a periodic feature of American life since the late 1800s (why it suddenly appeared then is a question that appears to have no answer) but it became particularly virulent in the early 1940s and remained at epidemic proportions well into the following decade, with between thirty thousand and forty thousand cases reported nationally every year. In Iowa, the worst year was 1952, which happened to be the first full year of my life, when there were more than 3,500 cases—roughly 10 percent of the national total, or nearly three times Iowa’s normal allotment—and 163 deaths. A famous picture of the time from The Des Moines Register shows assorted families, including one man on a tall ladder, standing outside Blank Children’s Hospital in Des Moines shouting greetings and encouragement to their quarantined children through the windows. Even after half a century it is a haunting picture, particularly for those who can remember just how unnerving polio was.
Several things made it so. First, nobody knew where it came from or how it spread. Epidemics mostly happened in the summer, so people associated polio with summer activities like picnics and swimming. That was why you weren’t supposed to sit around in wet clothes or swallow pool water. (Polio was in fact spread through contaminated food and water, but swimming-pool water, being chlorinated, was actually one of the safer environments.) Second, it disproportionately affected young people, with symptoms that were vague and variable and always a worry to interpret. The best doctor in the world couldn’t tell in the initial stages whether a child had polio or just the flu or a summer cold. For those who did get polio, the outcome was frighteningly unpredictable. Two-thirds of victims recovered fully after three or four days with no permanent ill effects at all. But others were partly or wholly paralyzed. Some couldn’t even breathe unaided. In the United States roughly 3 percent of victims died; in outbreaks elsewhere it was as high as 30 percent. Most of those poor parents calling through the windows at Blank hospital didn’t know which group their children would end up in. There wasn’t a thing about it that wasn’t a source of deepest anxiety.
Not surprisingly, a kind of panic came over communities when polio was reported. According to Growing Up with Dick and Jane, a history of the fifties, at the first sign of a new outbreak, “Children were kept away from crowded swimming pools, pulled out of movie theaters and whisked home from summer camps in the middle of the night. In newspapers and newsreels, images of children doomed to death, paralysis or years in an iron lung haunted the fearful nation. Children were terrified at the sight of flies and mosquitoes thought to carry the virus. Parents dreaded fevers and complaints of sore throats or stiff necks.”
Well, that’s all news to me. I was completely unaware of any anxiety about polio. I knew that it existed—we had to line up from time to time after the mid-fifties to get vaccinated against it—but I didn’t know that we were supposed to be frightened. I didn’t know about any dangers of any type anywhere. It was quite a wonderful position to be in really. I grew up in possibly the scariest period in American history and had no