She Walks Among Us

Iron Lungs And Fallout Shelters: The Fearsome Fifties

There was a new girl in our class at the beginning of second grade who wore a metal leg brace with leather straps. She also wore glasses and had asthma attacks. During air-raid drills,  Emmie was not required to crouch on the floor like the rest of us. She walked with a loping gait, and the brace clanked. If other kids accidentally brushed against her or touched her, or if she just got too close, they'd pretend to wipe "cooties" off themselves. They veered around her desk as if it were a biohazard area. Anything she touched was contaminated. If one kid picked up a pencil or a ruler, another kid would tell him that Emmie had touched it just a minute ago and the first kid would drop the pencil or ruler and squeal, "Eeeeugh! Emmie bugs!"

Nobody really believed they were going to catch anything from Emmie. We were mean, but we weren't totally ignorant. This was merely the natural cruelty of children. But the particular expression of it was what was significant. Poor Emmie, thanks to public health admonitions filtering down to us kids, had been equated with all kinds of nasty, dirty disgustingness.

We'd been warned for years about the invisible lurking danger. Stay away from public toilets, garbage cans and mud puddles, we were told, vaguely but sternly. The threat level always went up in July and August.

And we saw the pictures when we were kids: the monstrous metal cylinder with a head sticking out of it, resting on a pillow. The heads were usually those of children, and they were always smiling. Nurses and parents stood nearby, also smiling.

The polio stories told by people who caught it have a particularly harsh end-of-childhood quality to them. They often involve hot summer days, public swimming pools, terrible lassitude, blinding headaches. There's delirium, pain, fear, mother's cool hand on the forehead, an ambulance ride, then waking up to a rhythmic clunk-clunking, a snug rubber collar and a body missing from the neck down.

Another name for polio was infantile paralysis. Diphtheria, typhoid, tuberculosis, all of which once caused the proliferation in old cemeteries of those little tombstones with resting lambs carved on them, had been pretty much wiped out by then. Of the old-time ancient foe that was childhood disease, one of the worst and cruelest manifestations was polio, and it survived into the golden decade. And the same decade saw polio conquered by science. A lot of that had to do with data gathered during the war, a huge boon to research. It was 1955 when the Salk vaccine came out and changed everything. I remember lining up in grade school to get my shot. For some of us, like Emmie, it was too late.

The image of the child in the iron lung really personified the early 50s: They were hard at work on polio (testing vaccines on institutionalized mentally disabled kids, but what the hell), though they didn't quite have the know-how to keep you from catching it. If you did catch it, they could keep you alive--trapped in a big crude cumbersome nightmarish contraption, but alive. The cheer and smiles were ever so 50s, too.

People are in the habit of discrediting that 50s cheer, calling it shallow, phony, a false front. I disagree. That's facile, and doesn't do the era justice at all. I think those smiles were damned plucky and heroic, and I'm not being facetious at all. Disease? Death? Entropy? Pain and despair? Deny them! Give them no credence! Turn away from them. Look instead to science and civilization and shining new inventions! The country (and world) was fresh from the experience of World War 2 and hell on earth. Our natural reaction was to turn our attention to making heaven on earth. Ultimately futile, of course, but truly, humanly, touchingly valiant.

Perhaps the greatest symbol of 50s doom-and-cheer was that fabulous gift to science fiction writers, comics, folk singers and pop psychologists: the fallout shelter.

In shape and concept, it had a lot in common with the iron lung. It was kind of like a really big iron lung that you could crowd more than one person into. It was ugly, and crude, and you were trapped in it, but you were alive. And smiling! The pamphlets from the era had great illustrations: Mom and Dad and a couple of kids, bunk beds, shelves stocked with canned goods. The kids are on the floor playing checkers or maybe Parcheesi. Mom, wearing a dress and high heels, sits on one of the lower bunks, legs crossed, reading a magazine. Dad tends to the hand-crank that brings in fresh air. It looks like fun! A super-duper family adventure!