In the shadow of COVID-19, suburbanites recall polio crisis of the 1950s

When Palatine native Cheri Pinchot was growing up in the 1950s, polio was the scourge adults and children feared.

First reported in the United States in the mid-19th century, polio - at its most serious - caused paralysis and even death.

Before Drs. Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin developed vaccines, polio killed thousands, many of them children. According to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, polio crippled on average 35,000 people a year during periodic outbreaks during the mid 20th century.

Many of the stricken were treated in an iron lung, an artificial respirator made of metal, shaped like a tube and powered by electricity. A foreboding piece of machinery that enclosed the body, it helped patients breathe by decreasing pressure to force air into the lungs and increasing pressure to force air out. Patients typically spent weeks in these early ventilators, which occupied entire hospital wards.

Travel was sometimes restricted during polio outbreaks, the CDC reports. While statewide isolation orders like those issued in response to the COVID-19 pandemic were not in effect then, homes or towns were sometimes quarantined.

Anxious parents imposed their own brand of social distancing and kept their kids inside, especially during the summer, when the disease was more virulent and fear forced public pools, beaches and other venues to close.

After a boy in her neighborhood contracted the disease in midsummer in 1954 or 1955, Pinchot's mother kept her indoors for a week. When Pinchot was allowed outside, her mother forbade her to ride her bicycle near the boy's house.

"Within two to three weeks we heard he was in an iron lung," said the retired elementary teacher, now 72 and living in Deer Park. "He missed a year of school. ... He got better, but he walked with a limp."

"The feeling was that polio was a death sentence. It was so serious," said retired optometrist James Gremo, 85, of Des Plaines.

Gremo was a teen when the disease peaked, in 1952, a year during which polio caused more than 21,000 cases of paralysis, according to the CDC.

At the time, the polio virus was thought to be waterborne. Parents warned kids about playing in or near puddles, recalls Connie Pacheco, who was born in 1952 and grew up near Glenview.

"Our street corner used to flood all the time in big rains," Pacheco wrote in an email. Pacheco and her friends couldn't resist playing in the puddles.

"We'd ride our bikes through the flooded water to watch the water spray everywhere," she wrote.

After a boy in Pacheco's North Shore neighborhood contracted polio, warnings took on greater urgency.

"It was a very fearful time," Pacheco wrote in her email.

Like COVID-19, polio was an infectious disease caused by a virus that often spread through person-to-person contact. The introduction of a vaccine in 1955 sparked massive immunization efforts that significantly reduced the infection rate and all but eliminated the disease. The U.S. has been polio-free since 1979, although the disease remains a threat in some other countries, according to the CDC.

Gary Reijonen, 76, of Lindenhurst, didn't realize he had polio until a car struck him when he was about 7 or 8 years old.

"If the car hadn't hit me I would have kept going until my hip disintegrated," said Reijonen, who spent a year in a Highland Park hospital following his diagnosis. After using crutches for about seven years, he was able to walk unaided and even played high school football.

Things were a lot different then, said Reijonen, who grew up in Waukegan.

"People would talk to you but they didn't want to be around you," he said, adding, "parents didn't want their kids to play with me because they were afraid they'd hurt me."

As a teenager living in Chicago during the 1950s, James Gremo's wife Alice, 84, regularly delivered books and homework to a classmate who had contracted the disease. Gremo says her mother never voiced concern about her having contact with the boy.

Other parents, like Peter Phillips' folks, were more cautious.

Phillips, a Vernon Hills resident, grew up in Boston. When he was a youngster, polio was an illness associated with summer.

"If we got through (July and August) we were good for another year," said the 84-year-old.

To keep him safe, Phillips' parents sent him to camp every July. In August, the entire family drove to his mother's hometown near the Canadian border and spent a month there.

While attending Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts during the mid-1950s, Phillips, then 19, worked as an orderly in a hospital polio ward.

"I never worried about contracting the disease. I'm not sure why. I found a great deal of satisfaction working with patients," he said.

He believes that experience led to his career in customer service.

"I learned to enjoy working with people and taking care of their needs," he said.

The patients, many of whom were in iron lungs, had accepted their conditions and were in good spirits, said Phillips, who made the ward his first stop after his marriage.

"We had promised everyone on the ward we would visit them after the wedding, and we did," he said.