The biggest fear of our generation, when we were kids, was the possibility that we would end up crippled or living in an iron lung or dying. Summertime was the time when we would most likely be exposed, because that's when the virus was most prolific. I remember one summer, when I lived in Mount Shasta, in grades K-4, that I had 5 regular neighborhood playmates. Our mothers had told us that one of our playmate's brother had been exposed to polio at the swimming pool summer swimming lessons.We all got together every day in the summertime. Four of us were sitting on a porch planning planning our day, when his sister, one of our playmates, approached us. We all screamed and ran into the house. It was treating her as though she were a leper. She was Chinese, and her parents accused us of being racists.
The March of Dimes, based on the polio of President Franklin Roosevelt, was founded in those early years of our lives. That gave us some hope that if we got polio, we might survive. The fear of being attacked by the polio virus scared us more than the country being attacked by a Russian atomic bomb.
Salk was the son of Russian-Jewish parents, born in 1914, the same generation as the parents of most of us. He started research for the vaccine for the crippling, killing disease in 1947 and dedicated himself to it for 8 years. In his last years, he dedicated himself to searching for a vaccine against AIDS. Too bad he didn't get that accomplished. He died in 1995, when 80.
It was an appropriate tribute that Spokane's first junior high school was named after Salk. Schools are for kids. Saving kids from polio was a major accomplishment for kids' lives, so school and polio had a connection.