my thoughts, exactly:

Jim Chase

For all its serene beauty, the Crescenta Valley was a much more perilous place to grow up 40 years ago than it is today. I came to this realization while watching the recent PBS documentary, “An American Experience: The Polio Crusade.” The show chronicled the crippling effects of polio during the 1950s and 1960s, along with the battle to eradicate the often lethal disease.

Back during the height of the epidemic, entire hospital wards had been filled with row after row of massive medical ventilators, or “iron lungs.” Even one of my favorite TV shows, Gumby, featured an episode with the bendy green character inside of a claymation ventilator. Talk about your childhood nightmares. But it wasn’t just in the pages of Life magazine or on our black and white TVs that we saw the effects of polio. It was right here at home.

For most of my childhood, in fact, the frightening silhouette of a hulking iron lung could be seen behind the large picture window in a home on La Crescenta Avenue just above where the Foothill (210) Freeway off-ramp is today. Day and night the massive, black steel cylinder menacingly stood watch.

I never knew who lived there. We didn’t talk about such things back then — as if the mere mention of such an affliction could somehow bring it closer to your own family. My mom would only occasionally mention in hushed whispers that so-and-so’s brother or cousin or great Uncle had contracted polio (it seems to me that a public drinking fountain was usually involved) and that it was a terrible, horrible thing to happen to any family.

Thankfully, I grew up at the exact time effective vaccines became available. To this day, in fact, I can smell the freshly waxed linoleum tile hallway at Monte Vista where I stood in line with my elementary schoolmates waiting for the school nurse to hand us that small white paper cup with the sugar cube inside. That sweet little cube contained the Sabine oral vaccine that would protect us and millions of other kids for the rest of our lives. One worry at least, off our parents’ list.