Polio vaccine recipients remember field tests

ELKHART, Ind. -- Getting a shot in the arm wasn't nearly as scary as leg braces and iron lungs for Margaret Asbury when she was a second-grader taking part in the field trials for the polio vaccine in 1954.\n"I remember getting the shot and then a little glass of orange juice. We walked by and got a shot in the arm," Asbury told The Truth newspaper.\n"That wasn't scary for me. But you were always sort of scared about leg braces and iron lungs," she said.\nIn the first half of the 20th century, polio was a scourge that killed and paralyzed thousands. Children and parents were horrified by the prospect of life in an "iron lung," a metal ventilator where victims with collapsed respiratory systems lived, sometimes indefinitely.\nThe 1954 field trial was the largest voluntary clinical trial ever. The children who took the series of three shots became known as "Polio Pioneers." The trial was sponsored by the March of Dimes, a voluntary health agency founded in 1938 by President Franklin Roosevelt, who himself had been crippled by the disease in 1921 at age 39.\nThe March of Dimes' northern Indiana chapter is planning to honor the former Polio Pioneers with a series of events, including the organization's Signature Chef Auction, a major fund-raising event Oct. 26 at the Century Center in South Bend.\n"We want to honor them for what they did," said Carol Hummer, district director for the March of Dimes. "As children, they didn't realize what they did for the entire world."\nSome 650,000 students across the United States, including 20,573 from Indiana, took part in the tests. The children -- most about age 7 -- received the first of three shots on April 30, 1954. The received a second shot a week later and a booster shot after five weeks.\nAsbury still has the Polio Pioneer pin she received as a second-grader at Elkhart's Roosevelt School.\nNot all of the Polio Pioneers may still have the pins, but they still have the memories -- at least, as much memory as children of about 7 can retain after the passage of five decades.\nMarsha Watson remembers standing in line with her classmates, all rolling up their sleeves. Mary Hummel remembers the orange iodine that was placed on her arm before the shot.\nRon Stachel's memory is of ice cream. He hated shots, and his courage was rewarded with a trip to the Dairy Queen in downtown Elkhart.\n"I think I was too little to really understand it all," said Peggy Golightly of Elkhart, who attended Hawthorne School in the 1950s. "They told you that if you do this, it could prevent something that could be very harmful disable you and you could even die from it."\nBut Golightly, who still has her Polio Pioneer card, said she made sure that her own children received their polio vaccinations.\nIn 1955, the Salk formula was declared "safe, potent and effective." A few years later, an oral vaccine developed by Dr. Albert Sabin from live polio virus was introduced. The last polio case in the United States was recorded in 1979.