Our Stories

I am old enough to remember the days before vaccines. I remember lining up in my Catholic school cafeteria after church one Sunday to get the “ sugar cube” for polio. I was probably around 6 or 7. I also...

My grandfather walked with a limp because of atrophied muscles due to polio. Also my aunt contracted polio as a five year old child and became a quadriplegic. She died at 55 due to a weakened heart from complications of...

I had the good luck not to come down with polio that terrible summer of 1954 when so many kids succumbed to the scourge. I had nightmares of paralysis and of ending up in an iron lung. I lucked out...

It was 1950, and I was four years old. My doctor came to our house since we didn’t have a car. He said, “Touch your chin to your chest, please.” I couldn’t. He turned to my mother and said, “We...

I was born in 1958 so I remember getting the smallpox vaccine, which left a scar on your arm, and the polio vaccine which was administered orally. But vaccines for measles, mumps and rubella had not yet been developed so...