"Hey, driver! Hold up!" a voice cried from the bus' back door. "I can't wake up my buddy, and he's gotta get off here." Two boys were coming home from a Cubs game at Wrigley Field, and Richie, age ten, finally got Roosk, age nine, off the bus and down the half block to home. Roosk told his mom he was tired and dropped on his bed, not hearing her ask if he was ok. "Oh no, polio? Please God, not polio." Thus did she pray the prayer of all Chicago parents in the epidemic year of 1949. Roosk woke up 16 hours later with a fever. Doc Olson came over, did doctor things, and announced, "No polio." Later, Doc said to take the boy to the church's family-week camp. "I'll be there and can keep an eye on him."

Polio was no respecter of persons. The most famous victim was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. "Super Crip" crusaded against the plague by helping establish the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (NFIP), later known as the March of Dimes, the greatest health-related fund-raiser ever. Other notables stricken were Justice William O. Douglas, Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, track star Wilma Rudolph, actress Mia Farrow, filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, writer Wilfred Sheed, scholar Edward Le Comte, and … and Hitler's propagandist Joseph Goebbels.

The first major polio epidemic in the United States hit in 1916, spreading out from New York City, and for the next 39 years, the public simply took what poliovirus dished out. In the 1920s and 1930s, the annual rate of cases was 4 per 100,000; by the early 1940s, the rate doubled; by the late 1940s, it redoubled; by the early 1950s, it had reached 25 per 100,000, with a peak of 37 per in 1952. Between 1937 and 1955, 415,624 cases were reported, 57,879 in 1952 alone. Newspapers ran tallies of local victims—like baseball box scores—by age, sex, type of paralysis. The United States has 1.6 million living polio survivors, 600,000 of whom show ongoing effects; comparable figures for the world are 24 million and ...

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