Alaskans rallied around vaccines for polio. What has happened to us since?

If you are of age to receive a social security check, there’s a good chance a family member or old friend has said something like this to you: “When we were kids in the 1950s, we all just lined up at school and got the polio shot. It was no big deal. Everybody got the shot, and our parents were glad we did.”

Some former schoolchildren remember receiving a lollipop from the nurse afterward.

The obedient vaccination behavior of children of yesteryear is typically recalled in contrast to the response of many stubborn 21st-century adults who defy and refuse any and all requests and demands for COVID-19 vaccination.

Nostalgia is a powerful drug. It can immunize you against reality. I wondered: Did vaccination day really go that smoothly in Dwight Eisenhower’s America? The 1950s have been portrayed as an age of conformity. Did Americans conform when the Salk vaccine promised to save the nation, especially its children, from crippling illness, the dread iron lung, and death?

John McNulty, a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine, was on hand in April 1955 for the rollout of the Salk vaccine in New York City schools. After a lengthy testing program culminating in government approval of the vaccine, some 280,000 youngsters were vaccinated. Doctors and nurses vaccinated children at a rate of about 33 and one-third pokes per hour. Occasionally, a child would faint — but McNulty, with obvious delight, reported that children were less likely to faint than members of the nation’s armed forces who were vaccinated.

The vaccination rollout was imperfect. A relatively small number of children sickened from batches of vaccine that were flawed during manufacturing. A relatively few died. Scientists and technicians made rapid adjustments. The mass vaccination of American children continued across the nation — including in Fairbanks, where young Michael Carey got the shot at Nordale School. His mother, Mary, believed the vaccine was a miracle. She was an experienced public health nurse who had seen the ravages of polio.

In November 1954, the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner reported the deaths of brothers Wayne and Kenneth Cook, ages 9 and 4. The deaths were shocking. But in the early ‘50s, polio was reported all over the territory, including 40 cases in Seward alone in the first eight months of 1954. For a small community, this would have been a rolling trauma.

The Alaska victims were not exclusively children. Dr. John McCall, a 31-year-old professor of glaciology at the University of Alaska, died in November 1954. Dr. McCall, who had recently completed his advanced degree at Cambridge (UK) was expected to have a brilliant career. A tourist died too, Helen Goodwin, a 28-year-old North Dakotan.

Alaskans answered by raising money to fight polio through the March of Dimes. The Anchorage group gathered enough cash to purchase an iron lung. Civic groups responded with fundraisers - and not so civic groups did too. The B-girls at the Squadron Club in Fairbanks held a benefit dance “TO HELP FIGHT POLIO,” as their large advertisement in the News-Miner explained (furthering the legend of the dance-hall girl with a heart of gold.)

Schools were closed briefly. So were swimming pools. Large gatherings of children were discouraged. I found no reports of demonstrations or protests against these protective measures. Alaskans as a people accepted government intervention, although there must have been dissenters here and there.

What Alaskans could not accept was the death and deformity polio brought to the homes of the innocent. Alaskans had faith in science and faith in medicine, even if an occasional territorial doctor was an ancient rum pot who had completed his medical education while William McKinley was president.

The authorities, Alaskans wagered, knew what they were doing. This is the Alaska I entered as a boy. This is not the Alaska I am leaving as an old man.

Michael Carey is an occasional columnist and the former editorial page editor of the Anchorage Daily News.

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