What was it that caused one little Virginia mountain town to suddenly find itself faced, in the summer of 1950, with 200 cases of polio amid a population of just 5,500?
Photo from The Roanoke Times, Courtesy Wytheville Museums
These five Wytheville children were transported to Roanoke Hospital, where they breathed with the assistance of the hospital’s iron lungs.
The summer of 1950 was bad for Wytheville, Virginia.
Motorists sped through town with their windows rolled up, bandanas covering their faces. No way would they breathe Wytheville air. The swimming pools closed and then the movie theater. The Wytheville Statesmen semi-pro baseball team folded in July; nobody would play them. The draft board closed, even with war exploding in Korea.
Polio had struck. The Wytheville area was in the midst of a full-blown epidemic, the worst per-capita polio outbreak in the nation. Almost 200 people came down with crippling cases of polio in this close-knit community of 5,500. Twenty-three residents died. Roanoke Memorial – 80 miles away and the region’s polio hospital – was inundated.
People living around Wytheville were 100 times more likely to catch polio than people anywhere else. If they caught it, they were twice as likely to die. Ambulances headed out to hospitals in Roanoke or Richmond two or three times a day.
In Wythe County, 1950 became known as “the summer without children,” as frightened parents kept their offspring indoors. Swings hung listlessly in empty playgrounds as children entertained themselves with board games, reading and listening to radio stories.
One prominent family ordered a load of sand dumped in their living room for the youngsters. Southwest Virginia Enterprise editor James Williams lamented he couldn’t find delivery boys. The fear of contagion was so great that mothers baked their newspaper before allowing anyone to read it.
“It was a frightening time,” says polio survivor Eleanor Sage. “Mother and Daddy never took me anywhere that summer, and I still got polio.”
No one knew where polio came from or how it spread. It didn’t seem to follow rhyme or reason, hitting rich and poor, black and white, country folks and townies, children and adults. It made some deathly ill while sparing others who shared the same bed.
Most folks agree that the epidemic began in late June, when 20-month-old Johnny Seccafico, son of the Wytheville Statesmen second baseman, came down with a stiff neck and fever. He was rushed to Roanoke Memorial, where doctors decided against putting him in an iron lung to help him breathe. They wanted to save the machine for patients they expected to survive. Johnny defied the odds and lived, but within days, four other children grew sick with polio. A hundred more were sick within weeks.
Sage, who was nine years old that summer, was wading in the creek when she felt a strange pull in her left leg. She went home and began to feel nauseated. Her temperature crept higher and higher. For many, the polio experience would be limited to these flu-like symptoms. But for Sage, polio didn’t end with the flu.
“Dr. Huddle came right over,” Sage says. “He suspected polio right off, so he had Mother and Daddy take me up to the clinic for a spinal tap. He told us the results over the phone. We were on a party line, so he said some special word – used a code – to give us the results, in case anybody was listening.”
Motorists were warned to stay out of Wytheville in the summer of 1950.
Sage had paralytic polio in her legs. Because Wythe County had no rescue squad, she was taken to Roanoke Memorial and Crippled Children’s Hospital in the only ambulance available at the time, a hearse from the funeral home.
“It was scary lying in a hearse,” she says. “I was glad Mother went with me.”
The 120 beds at Memorial and Crippled Children’s Hospital were almost completely filled with polio patients during the summer of 1950. Some remained there for months. About five patients at any given time were in iron lungs. Polio had paralyzed their breathing muscles, so the machine pumped air in and out of their lungs. During power outages, nurses and orderlies had to hand-pump the iron lungs.
Patients came to Roanoke from all over Southwest Virginia, but mostly from Wytheville and surrounding Wythe County. Sage shared a room with an older girl from Wytheville. The nine-year-old was one of the luckier ones. Although the virus continued to rage through the bodies of some patients, deadening muscle after muscle, Sage got well quickly. She returned home in nine days, again riding in the hearse ambulance.
The trip to Roanoke took two hours in those days before Interstate 81. Patients suffered through the long, hot ride without air conditioning. If the ambulance stopped for cold drinks, filling station attendants would sometimes refuse to take their money and ask them to move on. The Pulaski mayor wrote a letter forbidding the ambulance to stop within his town limits.
Racial segregation was still the law in 1950. African-Americans with polio could not be admitted to the Roanoke hospital, although at least one Wytheville physician pleaded with them to make an exception. The ambulances had to take black polio victims to St. Philip Hospital in Richmond, 250 miles away. Ironically, some say they fared better there. None of the Wytheville patients sent to Richmond died; that was not the case in Roanoke.
Health officials still shake their heads when asked to explain the Wytheville polio epidemic. Probably a more virulent strain of polio was making the rounds, and maybe it struck a large group of people who hadn’t previously been exposed to the polio virus.
We now know polio spreads through contact with infected phlegm or feces. But back then, rumors ran rampant. After articles about Wythe County’s epidemic appeared in the Washington Post and Look magazine, people around that nation began weighing in with possible causes. The water supply, soil quality, dairy products, flies, mosquitoes and even butterflies took the blame. One fellow from a neighboring county suggested the plague struck Wytheville as punishment for its ABC liquor store.
People wanted to do something constructive, but they didn’t know what. Eugene Warren and a co-worker at Owens Drugstore would shoot rats out at the dump every night until dark. Town officials sprayed DDT around Wytheville. “We had no idea whether the spraying had an effect or not. But it made people see we did something,” town manager Carter Beamer told oral historian Linda Logan several years ago. Town council and the county board of supervisors put up highway signs warning tourists of the epidemic and asking them to visit another time.
“Wytheville was a ghost town,” Sage says.
Businesses remained open, even with few customers. About the only ones busy were doctors, who worked nearly round the clock, and the two funeral homes, who turned their hearses into ambulances. Some trips carried so many patient-passengers that drivers would lay them crosswise. Sometimes the children didn’t make it to the hospital. But even the casket salesmen kept their distance from Wytheville. D. L. Barnett went over to Bluefield Casket Company and bought all the child and baby caskets they had. He didn’t need them all, it turned out, and Wytheville residents over the years buried their dead pets in those small caskets.
As summer wore on, the number of polio cases waned. By October, the epidemic was declared over. Schools started, although there were a number of empty desks and children wearing leg braces. Eleanor Sage didn’t return to classes that year. She was confined to her bed, where her mother put her stiff legs through three sets of painful exercises each day. “I’m probably walking because of her,” Sage says.
When she did return to school in fall 1951, Sage wore braces, and did so for a few years after that. She still has problems with her left leg. But she considers herself one of the lucky ones. One Wythe County man, Lee Hale, spent 32 years in an iron lung. Another former Wythe woman, Dolores Thompson, now of San Diego, still sleeps in an iron lung every night to recharge her worn-out chest muscles.
Thankfully, polio has been eradicated from Virginia and the whole Western Hemisphere. In 1954 Jonas Salk developed a polio vaccine. Then in 1963 Albert Sabin developed an oral vaccine. In two years there were only 65 cases of polio in the nation and none since 1977.
The story of Wytheville’s terrifying summer has faded into memory. The town can be proud that it managed to walk on the sensible side of a razor-sharp line between reasoned caution and irrational panic. It can be proud that so many ignored self-interest and racial distinctions to provide medical care and ambulance service to all citizens during the crisis.
The memory of this summer is preserved in a permanent exhibit at Wytheville’s Thomas J. Boyd Museum, where visitors can view the coffin-sized respirator where Lee Hale spent his last 32 years. The collection also contains images of the polio victims, prescription records from 1950, an oral history of the epidemic by Linda Logan, and a reproduction of the highway sign warning travelers.
One Year Later: Wytheville as a National Banner Against Fear
A year after Wytheville’s polio nightmare, Look magazine – with a 3 million-plus national circulation – sent a noted medical writer to Wytheville to use the community’s experience as a caution against polio panic during the summer of 1951.
“What happened in the tiny Blue Ridge mountain town of Wytheville, Virginia last summer,” wrote Albert Q. Maisel, “is of tremendous importance to you, even though you live thousands of miles away. For Wytheville was last year’s polio town, the worst-hit community in America.”
The five-page piece, carrying nearly 20 photos of smiling Wytheville children and families, held the town and its citizens up as examples of how to remain calm if cases arose during the hot days of 1951.
“Parents everywhere can now learn, in advance, what Wytheville parents learned the hard way: to sit tight, to stay calm and not to fear polio,” Maisel wrote. “Insurance companies will now bet $5,000 against your $10, that no one in your family, adult or child, will get polio in the next two years.”
In seeking to reassure a nation still fearing a plague, Maisel cited improved diagnoses and care, better training and financial resources as reasons to follow the Wytheville example of standing up to the disease.
“Only in our fear of polio are we lagging,” the piece asserted, perhaps in echo of a president’s famous words 18 years earlier in relation to financial fears. –By Kurt Rheinheimer