By Barbara Rimkunas
This "Historically Speaking" column was published in the Exeter News-Letter on Friday, January 29, 2021.
The darkest days are still ahead of us. This is the winter of COVID-19. A year ago we didn’t see it coming – couldn’t imagine that half a million people would die and we’d shrug off the numbers as they rose. As bad as things have become, there’s just the slightest sliver of hope. Since last Friday (January 22nd) when people over the age of 65 became the anointed ‘group 1-B,’ I’ve heard voices – spoken aloud, through email or hastily typed into Zoom chat – delightedly announcing their dates. The dates, mostly February and March, are for appointments to get COVID-19 vaccinations. A few people said the on-line registration was frustrating and complicated, a few more have said it went smoothly. Your results may vary, we can suppose. The 65+ crowd has become increasingly more tech-savvy in the past year.
Back in the before times, the Exeter Historical Society piloted an oral history program. Our first three interviewees all remembered the days before widespread vaccination. Les Cooper remembered visiting a young friend who was encased in an iron lung – a victim of polio. “Back in the 40s,” he told us, “there was a scare. You know how people are worried about mosquitos and ticks and things now, back then people were worried about polio and they didn’t know what the heck to do about it so they made foolish suggestions about it like children should not be allowed to play in the dirt. That wasn’t going to happen and it didn’t.” He remembered lining up to get the Salk vaccine, “That was a marvelous thing to think that you were now bulletproof because polio was really frightening.”
The polio vaccination drive began just months after the announcement that Salk’s vaccine was effective. Polio was more likely to strike during the summertime. The first people eligible for vaccination in Exeter were 1st and 2nd graders. These kids, born in 1948 and ’49, are now members of the COVID-19 1-B club. Photos of their small, anxious faces as they lined up for the first of three injections became common features in the local newspapers. The first clinic was held at the Thompson gymnasium at Phillips Exeter Academy in May 1955. Over 400 children received their first dose. “Making up the entourage of youngsters who bravely rolled up their sleeves for the mass vaccination were pupils from Newmarket, Newfields, Stratham, Kensington, South Hampton and Exeter,” reported the Exeter News-Letter. Scheduled to get their second dose in June, the program ran into its earliest snag when there was not enough serum to provide the booster shots needed after the Federal Department of Public Health upped the standards to make it safer. The editorial writer groused about the hold up, but conceded, “there is the possibility that the government wished to give private organizations the opportunity for achievement and glory. That would be the way President Eisenhower and many others would like it. The final verdict in this confusing episode will, like Pearl Harbor, have to wait a long trial. Meantime, if we profit from the experience, some benefit will result.”
‘Some benefit” proved to be quite true. The polio vaccination crusade encouraged vaccination for other childhood illnesses. Many people were still under the impression that certain maladies were things children had to endure, somehow forgetting the savageness of these diseases. Exeter town records for 1810 reported a whooping cough outbreak, followed by listing the following deaths:
“July 9, 1810
A child of Mr. Nath. Bickford
A child of Mr. Samuel Loud
A child of Mr. Daniel S. Jones
A child of Mr. William Safford
July 23rd
A child of Mr. Phillip Osgood
August 6
A child of Mr. Nath. Connor
September 10
Catherine, only child of Mr. Thomas H. Burnton.”
Polio clinics moved to the newly opened Talbot Gym at Exeter High School and continued through the early 1960s when the Sabin oral vaccine made the process easier. Instead of needing a shot, the vaccine was delivered from a paper cup. Most of the COVID 1-B voices remember getting their polio vaccine this way. There are other differences, of course. Scenes from the polio days show lines and crowds that would make most of us uncomfortable today, although unlike COVID-19, you couldn’t get polio by standing in front of a sick person at the supermarket check-out. COVID makes the very air we breath a potential hazard. Now you can get vaccinated without ever leaving your car. Exeter High School is located in a different place from where it was in the 1950s and 60s, but it will be used as our place of sanctuary this time-around, too.
In the meantime, those of us relegated to phase 2-B or 3-B who won’t be getting vaccinated until summer, keep the masks on. Wash your hands. Remember that the same people who as slightly frightened children took a shot or a sip to help eradicate polio are now among the first ones to slow down this new killer. These are people with “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself” echoing in their heads. Brave souls, indeed.
Barbara Rimkunas is curator of the Exeter Historical Society. Support the Exeter Historical Society by becoming a member! Join online at: www.exeterhistory.org
Image: photo from the Exeter News-Letter October 13, 1955. Paul LeVasseur receives his polio vaccine from Dr. Edwin Lee, health officer at Exeter High School’s Talbot Gymnasium. Former Exeter Historical Society curator of collections, Nancy Merrill, is the nurse on the right.