It’s quite the experience to read a story as it unfolds, when you already know the ending.
Such is the case reading old newspapers, which I do regularly, and in order. Presently, I am at the start of Martinsville’s polio outbreak of 1949. While the people of the day were panicking about the unknown, I knew where this story would go.
Another advantage of time is that we can skip ahead and read what happens next, which molds my general understanding of a phenomenon into a more clear picture.
In 1947, four people in Martinsville and Henry County had polio. The Martinsville Bulletin particularly followed the case of Donald Stegall, 12, of Fieldale. He was the son of Fieldale’s iconic police officer, Alfred Stegall.
When Donald Stegall got polio in October 1947, all of Fieldale panicked, and they closed the schools for a week, and the theaters and the YMCA. His 14-year-old brother Bernard had died just a couple of months previously of a sickness that had not been diagnosed as polio, but later was thought probably had been.
It looked grim for Donald. One in 200 polio infections leads to irreversible paralysis, usually in the legs; however, about 5 to 10% of those paralyzed die when their breathing muscles become immobilized. Donald’s lungs were affected, and he had to be put in an iron lung, which would do his breathing for him. He also could not eat.
Donald, however, made an unusual and miraculous recovery. When he left the hospital, a nurse gifted him a chocolate pie. He returned to school on Feb. 25, 1948.
Polio news was quiet locally in 1948, but in 1949, it really picked up. In alarming succession in late summer, one then two then three then four, and more and more, local children and two young women were stricken with polio.
Most of them spent weeks or months in a hospital in Richmond recuperating. Richard Gravely III, who was 12 years old, died within a week of being diagnosed with polio. His father was the Richard P. Gravely who organized the local chapter of the Archaeological Society of Virginia in 1961 and who excavated Native American sites in Henry County.
Young Richard’s funeral was on the same day, coincidentally, as the kickoff of a local emergency polio fund drive. Proceeds would pay hospital expenses of local people with polio. Richard’s parents asked that instead of sending flowers, mourners donate to the polio fund to help others.
When I saw a lot of polio cases adding up in 1949, I skipped ahead another decade looking for local polio numbers. The polio vaccine came out in 1955, and though thousands took advantage of it, a great many people did not take their children to get the vaccine. Perhaps, then, it’s no surprise that in 1959, 34 local people, mostly young children, contracted this crippling disease, which by then could have been prevented.
Polio was eradicated in the US in 1979, and now it is nothing to strike fear in the hearts of parents.
For the past four years, I have read the daily newspapers of 100, 75, 50 and 25 years ago, and a few months ago, added 1960, to follow the civil rights movement. I put snippets of happenings from each of those years into a daily column, “Looking Back,” on the Martinsville-Henry County Historical Society’s website, www.mhchistoricalsociety.org, and I also give links to the columns each day on the Historical Society’s Facebook page.
For the 75-years-ago segment, I’m up to 1949 – but during the Covid-19 pandemic, I was in 1946 and 1947, when a diphtheria outbreak was sickening children in the area. The disease is caused by a bacteria which creates symptoms which make breathing difficult.
It was interesting to contrast how the media of the 1940s covered disease attacks versus the way media of today does. During the Covid pandemic, I was a reporter under a pushy editor who was salivating for any names and personal information on Covid victims, but all that information was kept private under HIPAA laws, even though numbers of people who contracted the disease were published each day by the health department.
Meanwhile, the newspapers of the 1940s not only told you exactly who got diphtheria, but how old that child was, where he or she went to school, the parents’ names, their address and sometimes where the parents worked. Newspaper stories followed up later on how that person was doing, and who in the family got vaccinated.
In those days of such ugly arguments about the Covid vaccine and masks, it was quite something to read straightforward newspaper articles from the 1940s saying that local doctors and nurses went right into the schools to vaccinate students during the school days. Reports told you how many children in each school had been vaccinated on which days.
The way diphtheria was presented in the newspaper indicated that parents were afraid of their children contracting it and would do anything to keep them protected. It was a tremendous change from what I was actually living through during the Covid pandemic, of parents not trusting the safety and health methods which would have protected their children, as much as possible, from the disease.
Of course, when we read those old newspapers, we have no idea of how much of the real story was left out, and which voices were not heard, but we certainly get the impression that not as many voices were heard (or even acknowledged as worthy) as now.
If you experienced diphtheria or polio as a child, or were close to someone who did, please share your memories with the Historical Society. You can reach me at Kozelsky.mhchs@gmail.com. While we’re at it – do you know exactly where in Chatham Heights the city trash dump and incinerator were, in the 1940s? I’ve been reading a lot about that lately, too!
