(children laughing
and chattering)
NARRATOR:
The summer of 1950 started
like most summers
in the small town
of Wytheville, Virginia.
School let out,
the town pools opened,
and kids flocked to the soda
fountain on Main Street.
Almost 40% of the town's
5,500 residents
were under the age of 18.
JOHN M. JOHNSON:
Wytheville was
more or less a lazy-type,
laid-back town.
Everyone knew everyone.
It got really hot
in the summertime,
and we would go swimming.
We were happy-go-lucky kids.
(splashing)
ELEANOR SAGE:
I had a pair of my grandfather's
rubber boots on
and I was wading in the creek.
And when I went to get out,
I felt like something pulled
in my leg.
I went home
and hadn't been home too long
till I started running
a temperature
and was real nauseous, and just
kept going higher and higher.
BETTY COOK BROWN:
I was outside playing.
I just didn't feel right.
By the time I got inside
the house to my mother,
I told her I was sick.
I had a headache.
I was so dizzy.
And after that,
I just passed out.
ANNE B. CROCKETT-STARK:
The doctor came to do a spinal
tap on my brother,
and he screamed.
And my mother ran downstairs
with a bed pillow,
went out in the backyard and
covered her head with a pillow,
and laid there and screamed.
EUGENE F. WARREN:
We only had two ambulance
services in Wytheville.
One would come into the clinic
with a suspected case
while the other one would be
coming out of the clinic
and leaving for either Roanoke
or Richmond.
In, out; in, out;
in, out; in, out.
Mr. Williams' tote board
was right across the street
from where I worked,
and it was always visible,
and every once in a while,
we'd go to the front door
and look out.
Every time another one came in
with the diagnosis,
well, they changed the count.
♪ ♪
CROCKETT-STARK:
Daddy and Mama took everything
Sonny owned--
all of his clothes, his bed,
his chest of drawers,
and he had a fabulous comic book
collection.
And they took everything out
to the middle of the garden,
and they just made a pile
and burned everything he owned.
They were told to do that
so that we would not get it.
NARRATOR:
Polio was hitting
Wytheville hard--
harder that year than
any place in the country.
WARREN:
It became more and more evident
that we were really in trouble,
and without knowing what to do
or how to stop it
or how to get away from it.
We were just stuck with it.
You just couldn't pick up
everybody and leave,
and you couldn't set
the whole town on fire.
So it was a...
it was almost...
not hopeless, but it was getting
pretty close that way.
NARRATOR:
Since the turn
of the 20th century,
polio, also known as infantile
paralysis, had become
an increasingly menacing fact
of American life.
Highly contagious,
the polio virus
tended to strike
during the summer.
SAMUEL L. KATZ:
It was very reliable.
Come June, July,
you began to see
cases of polio,
and they continued on
through September.
NARRATOR:
The symptoms ranged from
a mild headache and nausea
to muscle weakness, paralysis,
or death.
KATHRYN BLACK:
One never knew how it would go.
Would it pass through the body
and the person would get up
out of bed
a few days later, just fine?
Would there be one leg damaged?
Would both arms?
JULIUS YOUNGNER:
The paralytic effects
would last for life.
And you didn't have
to look very far
to see people who had been
crippled with polio,
and crippled in terrible ways.
NARRATOR:
In 1921, the disease struck
an especially prominent citizen
just as his political star
was on the rise.
Polio usually targeted children,
but Franklin Delano Roosevelt
was 39.
After contracting
a sudden fever and chills,
he lost the use
of both his legs.
BLACK:
FDR was
an enormous landmark in
the whole history of polio.
The fact that he came down
with polio
changed the course of
the disease in this country.
NARRATOR:
Roosevelt worked to restore
both his body and his career.
He bought
a remote Georgia resort
whose spring-fed baths were
reputed to have healing powers
and turned it into the
Georgia Warm Springs Foundation,
committed to rehabilitating
polio patients
from around the country.
In 1928, a still-paralyzed but
vital FDR fought his way back
onto the national
political stage.
To keep the fight
against polio alive,
Roosevelt turned to
his law partner, Basil O'Connor,
a man who knew little
about polio,
but a great deal about power
and persuasion.
"I was never a public
do-gooder," O'Connor declared,
"and had no aspirations
of that kind."
Short-tempered and relentless,
he was a working-class Irishman
who had to dig and fight for
everything he had achieved.
DAVID M. OSHINSKY:
Basil O'Connor has no interest
in being the head of
the Warm Springs Foundation.
But he is so loyal
to Franklin Roosevelt,
and he really believes
the only way to ensure
FDR's political career
is to take over this institution
that is so close to FDR's heart.
NARRATOR:
With Roosevelt now
in the White House,
O'Connor worked tirelessly to
keep the organization afloat.
America was experiencing
the worst economic depression
in its history.
Charities' traditional
source of funding,
donations from the rich,
had completely dried up.
Worse still, the number of cases
of polio continued to rise.
OSHINSKY:
What made polio so questionable,
what made it so hard for people
to get a grip on,
was that at the very time
America was becoming
a cleaner,
more antiseptic society,
the polio rates were going up
dramatically.
♪ ♪
NARRATOR:
In time, scientists would unlock
some of polio's mysteries.
They would learn the virus
entered the body
through the mouth;
that it passed
from person to person
through contaminated water,
food, or physical contact.
They would come to understand
that modern sanitation
actually helped explain
the prevalence of the disease.
Infants in clean environments
were less likely to be
exposed to the virus
and develop life-long immunity.
PAUL A. OFFIT:
Before improvements
in sanitation,
all children were born
with antibodies against polio.
When we had improved sanitation,
children started to become
exposed to polio
later and later in life,
at a time when those antibodies
they had received from their
mother had already disappeared.
And that's why you saw
an emergence of the disease.
NARRATOR:
In 1938, O'Connor didn't know
much about the science of polio.
What he did know was
that polio patients depended
on private charities like his,
not the government, for help.
Without a new way
to raise money,
his foundation could offer
little more than hope.
It was time, he decided,
to try something bold.
