In June 1944 the weather in New York turned torrid. Adults in the hi-rise buildings of the Italian neighborhood took to the stoops; they bedded on metal fire escape. Children played ball in the evening hours and sought the cool waters of day when fire hydrants were released. That summer, city pools and playgrounds remained open, but few of the Mulberry Street neighbors would send their children. There were two war fronts that year; the one in the Pacific where many of its young men would die, and the one stateside where a polio epidemic was ravaging the young.
Fear gripped the city. Was it the heat, the city pools; was it because people did not wash their hands properly? Was it because the playgrounds were still open to baseball, and its children were falling prey to too much energy from the sun and too little rest? Parents were perplexed and scared.
There was little known of the disease in those days; the incubation period; whether or not carriers who did not get the disease could infect others. Mothers panicked when their healthy children’s nausea turned to vomiting with abdominal pain. They feared the combination of fever and muscle aches; invariably thinking of paralysis.
Many of the families who could afford it, sent their children to camp in upstate New York, thinking they would escape the outbreak. No longer were they concerned that the Germans might infiltrate the country through its harbor. Their passion was reserved for an indiscriminate killer; a virus that had no cure. Little did the families know that polio had carriers, a nameless society, who would unknowingly infect others yet be safe themselves. The camps were not exempt; there was no known immunity from the virus that seemed attracted to the vibrancy of youth.
Worthy Witness 
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