Gaye LeBaron: Why what we learned from the polio epidemic matters now

Ina May Larkin had a doctor's appointment for a polio vaccination in the summer of 1959. She was 22 years old, an Ursuline graduate and was making a last visit to a Missouri convent where she had contemplated taking vows as a nun. She was on her way home to continue her studies at Santa Rosa Junior College.

With two other students she had arranged for a physician to come to the convent and administer Dr. Jonas Salk's “miracle' vaccine that had been steadily decreasing the sporadic epidemics of polio that had plagued the nation and the world for half of the 19th century. It probably didn't seem like anything more than a slight delay when the doctor didn't show up for the appointment. But for Ina May it would prove disastrous.

By the fall of that year, this vivacious and talented young woman, a skilled musician who played violin, piano and trumpet, was a song leader at SRJC and hoped to become a teacher, had contracted the disease and was very ill - paralyzed and unable to breathe on her own.

She may have been the last Santa Rosa resident - at least of her generation - to contract polio. And for the next 41 years, until her death at age 63, she would live with a respirator. At first it was the formidable tanklike machine known by the daunting name of “iron lung.” As medical technology advanced she lived with fewer and fewer restrictions, until she was “only” in a wheelchair with an air hose attached to what she called “a breathing machine.” She could move one of her toes. Nothing else.

But photos of her early and late show clearly that her facial muscles worked well. She always had a big smile for the camera; and for family and friends.

Those friends were many and faithful. Her schoolmates chipped in to buy her “extras,” like an FM radio so she could listen to the music she loved and the automatic page-turner that allowed her to read. Ultimately her Ursuline High School classmates would establish a formal fund to help with expenses. And they visited often, some came regularly to help her write letters and assist in her various enterprises, like the sale of Christmas cards, and the care of the finches and cockatiels she raised to keep things from getting too quiet. Others, who moved away, kept in close touch. She was, they will tell you now, an inspiration.

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FOR THOSE among us of a certain age, polio was the terror of our youth.

We remember our friends who were infected… some who died, others who would be disabled to greater or lesser degree, for the rest of their lives, as was our President Roosevelt. It seemed random. Some years it bordered on epidemic. Other years it passed us by.

The early 1940s were epidemic years in Sonoma County. In 1942 The Press Democrat owner Ernest Finley mounted a campaign to send two Santa Rosa nurses to New York to be trained in the latest treatment methods to prevent paralysis from the disease. And the Elks Club raised funds to buy an iron lung for the Sonoma County Hospital - the only one in a four-county area.

These measures may well have saved lives because 1943 was an epidemic year. More than 100 people - most of them schoolchildren - were quarantined at the County Hospital that summer.

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JACK SHEA, the 12-year-old student body president – and quarterback – at St. Rose School was No. 100. He would later recall that there were 40 or more people quarantined at County Hospital, so many that he and several others were put in beds in the hospital morgue. A July account reported that three to five polio victims were being hospitalized every day. That doesn't sound ominous compared to the current COVID-19 count, but Sonoma County had just 50,000 people in the early '40s and Santa Rosa just 12,600.

There is a photo of Jack Shea, taken earlier that year, in a book of Santa Rosa history. He is shown standing on his front lawn. Straight and tall, shoulders back. After that summer he never stood straight again. His body was weakened and twisted by the scoliosis that resulted from the disease.

Not that he ever let it stop him. What he couldn't do with his body, he did with his mind, his conscience and his dedication. He was, as friends described him, a “crackerjack” lawyer who once held the county record for the largest insurance settlement ever awarded. Santa Rosa's Federal Building bears his name.

He died in 1985, at 54, from what came to be known as “post-polio syndrome,” a weakening return of the disease that had been considered eradicated in this country for decades.

Shea always considered himself “one of the lucky ones.” There were children his age in his hometown that didn't live through that summer of '43.

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MILT BRANDT, the acknowledged leader of the long campaign to build Warm Springs Dam, was 30 when he contracted polio. He was part of a family with 19th century roots in the Healdsburg and Dry Creek area. In 1953 he was home from World War II, married, with small children, working an “extra” construction job while tending two ranches - one with cattle, another with prunes.

In a 1999 video interview (digitized online in Special Collections at Sonoma State University's Schulz Library), Brandt told his story. “Salk and Sabin were working feverishly on the vaccine, ” he said, when he made two weekend trucking runs to Sonora and San Francisco, hauling cattle on one, and an apple grater for a local fruit company on the other.

“Coming home I got out of the truck in Petaluma, fell down and got back up and I didn't know what had happened, you know.”

“I made it home, to the family doctor and he was quite concerned and they took me out of the house and I stayed with my mother-in-law in town, away from our four children.

“The following morning he was advised to go down to isolation in the County Hospital. “I went down there Monday morning and they did a spinal tap on Tuesday and the polio virus showed up. Well, by Wednesday I couldn't move my right arm and by Wednesday night I was in the iron lung.”

“It was very confining. I've had a dread of going back there ever since. I was in the hospital five and a half months. There were 14 of us in and out over that period of time.”

Brandt had many extensive surgeries, with mixed results. “Polio is a very erratic thing,” he said. “You don't know what you're gonna lose next. But I did get up on crutches and long leg braces for a few years … the last 10 or 15 years I've been pretty much confined to a wheelchair and the post-polio condition is still progressing. I've lost muscle out of my hands and fingers which kinda gives you an uneasy feeling. That you don't know what's going to go next.”

And, of course,” he added, “the year following they came out with the Salk vaccine and I was just getting around at the time and was appointed chairman for the county and Healdsburg had the largest turnout for vaccination of any city in California. We figured we had 93% for Sabin.”

Brandt, who died in 2003 at 80, founded a family insurance company with offices in the Brandt Building on the Healdsburg Plaza. And there is another good reason the name sounds familiar, well beyond that town plaza.

Drive to the end of the Dry Creek Valley and find, at Warm Springs Dam, the Milt Brandt Visitors Center.

The visitors don't know the half of his story.

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PERHAPS WE SHOULD apologize for yet another “bad news from the past” chapter of local history. But, for those who have not experienced anything remotely like the current situation, it may helpful to learn what we - that “collective we” - lived through, as a nation and a culture, and survived.

Polio's history can be viewed from many angles - as family tragedy, as dear friends lost, as a triumph for science.

The older generations have names to recite and stories to tell - sad stories of family or childhood and high school friends lost, of “narrow escapes” with little or no after effects.

Oh yes, there are polio stories. Just as there will be corona or COVID (we still haven't made a final decision on a common term) stories told 60 years from now. The question historians will ask and try to answer coherently then is the same question we ask now about the 1918 influenza and polio. Did we learn anything? And did the world change?