By Pauline Masson –
I am entering my 27th month of the fatigue syndrome associated COVID, aka Long COVID. Except for a rare car ride to Liberty Field with my walker for a short trek on the driveway – and an occasional car ride from my driveway to the driveway next door at the school district office to attend a Safety Net meeting – I have been largely hibernating at home.
As an unreconstructed workaholic, my greatest discomfort is guilt because there is so much work that I wish I could do – clean my windows inside and out, reshuffle my closet for the season, iron Bob’s shirts and make desserts for the senior center.
Through it all, I never forget that even though I have lost two friends to this disease and visit on the phone with fellow Long COVID sufferers, this is not our community’s first epidemic.
In the fall of 1946 and winter of 1947 the nation was entering the worst polio epidemic in world history and Pacific was hit particularly hard. Residents of a certain age still recall the fear engendered in that long ago quarantine.
Polio, like the coronavirus, is a highly contagious virus. Before Dr. Jonas Salk introduced the first successful polio vaccine in 1962, it was a killer and a crippler that afflicted mostly children. Every summer there were new cases and in sporadic years the number of polio cases became an epidemic. The 1940s and 50s were the worst
There was one ray of hope. The late President Franklin Roosevelt, who had died the previous year had been diagnosed with polio twenty years earlier and school kids in Pacific, as kids across the country did, carried the March of Dimes cards to raise money to fight polio. And, the president had appeared to have recovered. The appearance was misleading. President Roosevelt never walked on his own after the original diagnosis. But with iron determination, painful leg braces, the arm of one of his sons and the athletic technique of slinging one paralyzed leg and then the other forward, he appeared to walk. And he always smiled, signaling that all was good.
Throughout the spring and summer of 1946, newspapers across the country carried stories of the number of new cases, the need for more nurses, and politicians arguing over the meager supply of Gamma Globulin that some officials thought might fight it. The National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis ( the March of Dimes) and the government spent $6 million to buy iron lungs needed to treat the victims.
The New York Times reported that 26,000 cases of polio were reported in the U.S. in 1946 making it the worst epidemic in the nation’s history up to that time.
For some reason that no one ever understood, polio cases in the small town of Pacific reached terrifying numbers. It was considered an epidemic when two cases occurred in a population of 10,000. Pacific’s first two cases were reported on September 29, 1946 when Betty Harbison and Rose Marie Smith were afflicted.
The town went into total panic. Schools were closed for at least two weeks, At the city council’s request all public gatherings were cancelled, Church services were suspended, the Royal Theater closed and Williams Shack cancelled its Saturday night dances.
When school officials reported at s town meeting that they planned to reopen the schools. parents in attendance said if the schools opened they would not send their kids to school.
Within three months the number of cases in Pacific had reached 10 among its population of 2,500, which was twenty times epidemic proportion.
In the summer of 1947 parents kept kids indoors all summer. Victims and their families were quarantined in their homes. Residents avoided even going on the streets where polio victims lived.
In January 1948, Neil Brennan’s father Pearl Brennan, who was chairman of the Pacific Lions Club that had taken charge of March of Dimes drive here. He wrote a report on the full scope of the epidemic up to that time that the local newspaper printed on its fourth page.
He described the citizens response to his committees request for funds. Hundreds of letters had come in with fifty cents and 25 cents. One included a note. “I am only sorry that I cannot afford to give more.” Another letter had $5, which Lions member knew the donor could not afford. The article reminded would-be donors that their gift would go to paying the entire cost of care for polio victims.
Of the twenty cases in Franklin County ten had been in Pacific. Those afflicted, were age five to twenty-five, He named the victims and noted that the Polio Foundation had paid a total of $18,828 for the care of all patients in Franklin County – $15,488 was paid for the care of Pacific patients. Six cases had recovered, he said. Two cases were still crippled. Two cases were in the hospital and had been there for more than a year.
His report is a wonderful read, although it’s a tearjerker.
In 2009 I interviewed May Doe, who was stricken after Mr. Brennan’s report at age twelve. Some 60 years after the event she recalled, not for the pain or fear it engendered, not for the iron lung and braces she had to endure, but for the isolation. People treated her as though she had the proverbial plague. Even her best friend, terrified to be near her, ran away when she saw her on the street.
Healthy kids who could not visit their friends who had polio joined the Lion’s Club fund raising efforts. High school girls went door to door asking for donations and the local newspaper urged citizens to give generously. A group of small children opened a soda pop and cookie stand in a Columbus Street front yard to raise funds. The Pacific Bottling Works provided the soda and mothers baked continuous batches of cookies for the young fundraisers to sell. St. Bridget School students held a rummage sale. Others joined the campaign,’
The Pacific PTA auctioned sixteen home made cakes at a Friday ballgame. The Father Edward Knights of Columbus staged a magic show to benefit the polio fund. The Pacific V.F.W. organized a U.S. Army recruiting service where they showed a one and a half hour movie of actual battle scenes in the High School Auditorium. Admission was a free-will offering to benefit the polio fund.
One intrepid lady, Blanch Pletcher, who was 73 at the time, waived fear to stage a one-person campaign to bring aid and friendship to the isolated polio victims.
Everybody knew Mrs. Pletcher. You went to her house on Union Street, where she ran the insurance agency she inherited from her father C.C. Close, to get your driver’s license or to have a paper notarized. She was the grand-daughter of the builder of the town’s first stone church and brick schoolhouse, daughter of the town editor, wife of the popular town dentist, and mother of the United States Air Force Surgeon General. She was the great aunt of the late Nellie Mueller and Edna Myers.
To me Blanch Pletcher was a presence in her own right. When polio isolated victims and their entire families from their friends and neighbors she donned a nurse’s uniform with a bold Red Cross on the chest and visited every single victim. Day after day, she carried in their groceries, helped with insurance forms and picked up their medicine at the town’s two pharmacies. She also reminded the rest of the town of their responsibility to their neighbors and campaigned to raise funds to make sure the polio victims had the basic needs for survival.
The town marveled at her courage, contributed to her polio victims’ fund and worried that she would eventually catch the disease herself. She didn’t.
I was always sorry that I never knew Mrs. Pletcher. As a person who pores over old newspaper clippings, I’ve seen her name hundreds of times – when she was elected to various boards, when she witnessed election results or court documents as a notary, every time her famous son came to visit. She was recognized as the ‘literary leader’ of the Pacific Chapter of the P.E.O. Her son, General Pletcher, once told me that she loved reading more than anyone he ever knew. “She had me reading Beowulf in the fifth grade,” he said.
She lost her husband in 1934 to a freak stove explosion accident. But throughout her life it is no exaggeration to say that Mrs. Pletcher was a fixture in Pacific. She was the only woman in a weekly poker game with local judges and town officials. She is said to have smoked cigars. But the story that pops into my memory at every mention of her name was her response to the polio epidemic.
This social distancing I have experienced due to COVID, seems mild compared to the 1946-1948 polio epidemic here. I can still read old newspapers and write about heroes.
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Portions of this post have appeared in previous stories published by the author.
