On this day, April 13, 1955, this was the main headline on the New York Times:

[Hekate]

34. I was 7, & can't tell if my memory of the sugar cube with the pink dot is mine or an overlay...

However, I vividly remember getting the shot, because a clinic was set up in a classroom at our elementary school. The organizers must have set the time for after adults got off work, because whole families came & it was dark when mine got there.

The line started at the classroom door, went down the sidewalk of the building, across the big playground, out the gates, and way down the sidewalk outside the school. My little sister was needle-phobic and pitched a fit that probably could be heard for a mile. After some soothing talk that didn’t work, Mom just held her tight until it got done. I can just hear the anti-vaxxers of this era clutching their pearls at the child-abuse and trauma. Fck that noise, you idiots. My baby sister had caught every damn thing my brother and I brought home from school before that, and it didn’t “strengthen her immune system,” it wrecked it.

The only people who didn’t bring their kids would have been considered fringe religious nuts back then. Every other adult in the country was righteously terrified of their children getting this deadly and crippling disease. Every single school had its share of children who survived but were crippled for life — and there were more that were not in school because they were not able to manage without a wheelchair or they were dead.

My grandchildren are unvaccinated. It breaks my heart. The most terrible diseases in the world were wrestled to the ground and almost vanquished in my parents’ generation and my generation — and look where we are now.

God bless Salk and Sabin. God bless the scientists.