Aura Lee

     We are back in Kansas and I am back in barbershop.  Thursday evening we went to Hoxie to put on a program at a place called “The Living Room”.

    It was a remodeled store with an open ceiling, a davenport front and center for audience seating (nobody sat in it), some fairly comfortable plastic folding chairs, and a back row of stools  so everyone would have a good view of the performers, who performed from the floor, no stage. 

    The owner-developer is an opera singer who seeks to bring a little culture to Western Kansas.  So why did she have a bunch of barbershoppers in her “living room”?  She has just completed the renovation, and she wanted to hear what a group of singers sounded like in her premises.  What better than barbershoppers who don’t need any instruments for accompaniment, and for the most part are pretty well behaved?

      So we sang.  The acoustics were great.  No need for sound equipment either.

    I was the MC and as usual found it necessary to tell a few lame jokes to spice up the evening.  So when we were done singing “Aura Lee”, I mentioned that the tune had many uses, such as Elvis’s “Love Me Tender”.  Much less well-known was the Dr. Jonas Salk version.  It went, “When you take your polio vaccine, don’t take it or-a-lee.”  Ha ha.

     Of course that joke set me to thinking about polio and what it meant in the early 50’s and what it means, or doesn’t mean, now.  The reminiscences of small pox inoculations in a previous blog aided and abetted the thinking process. 

     I remember taking two different polio vaccines as a kid, one a shot when I was in second or third grade (a classmate passed out after his dose), and another when I was in sixth or seventh grade, the second one being a sugar cube with a brown drop in it.  Both were administered in the school gymnasium.

     A little Wikipedia research reminded me (maybe I never really knew) that Salk and a fellow named Albert Sabin were in a competition to bring an effective polio vaccine to market. Salk, who really didn’t feel he was competing, won with his injection of dead virus, but Sabin, who saw Salk as an upstart trying to unseat him, had his day with the oral dose, too.

      None of that information was relevant at the time I was immunized.  What was important was that polio was no longer a terrible threat.  One classmate had had polio as an infant and suffered some health problems as a result.  Another fellow in Limon was permanently paralyzed as a result of polio.  I remember a movie trip cancelled due to the fear of infection after the Limon kid developed polio.  I don’t remember if there was a swimming pool at the time, but if there was, jumping into a public swimming pool would be strictly verboten.

      But the greatest fear of all for claustrophobic me was the iron lung.  I knew of the iron lung because of another nearly-forgotten exercise—fitting dimes into slots in a blue and yellow card.  Yes, the March of Dimes.  The flyer accompanying the cards, handed out in every classroom in America, possibly, showed a kid whose diaphragm muscles had been paralyzed by polio, lying in this contraption with only his head and feet sticking out, as I remember it.  Somehow, the iron lung would compress the lungs so that they exhaled and inhaled, thus preserving the life of the stricken person.  It seemed a horrible thing to me, for who knew how long you would be confined, really confined, in that machine before your muscles could recover enough so you could breathe on your own, if ever they would.

     So, we would all take our cards home, find dimes to put in the slots and return them to our classroom teacher.  Our family could have had as many as four of those cards at one time.  I do remember dimes being scarce, that nickels destroyed the slot, and one time taking a dollar bill folded into the card because we didn’t have the dimes.

     And then came the great vaccination.  We lined up and marched to the gym.  I would probably have been in the third grade. A nurse or two supervised the line and helped us roll up our left shirt sleeve.  Right before we got to the guy with the needle, a nurse swabbed the arm with cotton soaked in rubbing alcohol.   We got the shot.

       I didn’t care too much for injections, but I do remember a sense of relief when I thought that by taking that shot, I no longer had to fear polio and the iron lung.  In the Wikipedia account, there was a national burst of joy when it was confirmed that a huge trial of the Salk vaccine provided a 95% success rate  in immunizing kids to polio.  Salk became a national hero and went to the white house (President Eisenhower) to receive a medal of honor.  And the March of Dimes card became a thing of the past.

     All of this because of a bad pun, "don't take it Aura Lee".  Occasionally, I hear a cracked pot go off on the evils of vaccines and I want to suggest that that person move to Pakistan or Afghanistan where those vaccines have not done their marvelous work relieving parents of the fear of losing a child to polio or small pox.

      Polio vaccine will definitely be on my list of things I’m thankful for.

     Here are a couple of other things I’m thankful for (have to have some reason to upload a photo or two):

  

     Fall isn’t my favorite time of year even though it is beautiful—you have one foot in the snow bank, so to speak.  One of the rewards of Fall:  Sandhill Cranes creaking (always reminds me of the press wheels and chains on the old grain drill when they need greasing) their way south. 

     After the years of drought, any moisture, even snow is welcome.  It will be gone before 2 p.m.