Our Remarkable Wexford Neighbor: Dr. Jonas Salk

I’ve spent most of this week in the hospital. My husband was having hip replacement surgery, and I was his head cheerleader and go-fer. He was released yesterday and is gamely learning to master the crutches, sleep in an unnaturally straight-legged position, and deal with the pain. Because of my preoccupation with medical matters, I thought I’d write this week about the worst epidemic in our young lives. And how it was successfully vanquished a little over 50 years ago--in our hometown of Pittsburgh by a man living in our midst.

In my posting for April 12, I reprinted the Allegheny Journal article mentioning that the famed virologist Jonas Salk spoke at the dedication of North Allegheny High School in October 1954. Last year I read Jeffrey Kluger’s book Splendid Solution (2004, Penguin paperback) about the conquest of polio by Dr. Salk and his research team at the University of Pittsburgh. Ames Public Library had selected it for a book club discussion led by a local physician. Knowing about the connection between N. Allegheny and Salk, my curiosity was whetted. A big crowd attended the discussion, and I was fascinated by the stories people of around my age told about surviving the disease or watching their siblings suffer from it and their parents deal with the aftermath.

The fear poliomyelitis (aka infantile paralysis) engendered in my family those summers of my young life (1947-1953) is still a vivid memory. It must have been especially hellish for new parents to see their infants, who were quite healthy one day, develop fever, chills, labored breathing, and eventually useless limbs in a matter of hours or days.

An Egyptian tomb carving from the 18^th dynasty of a boy with a dropped foot, an atrophied leg, and a walking stick suggests the disease may have been around for 4000 years. In the U.S., 1916 was a particularly bad year in eastern cities. Afflicted children were taken from their parents to isolation facilities where they stayed until they either died or recovered and returned home once they were no longer a danger to anyone else.

In 1952, my husband’s parents, who had recently arrived in Lancaster, Pa. from a displaced persons camp in Germany, were so worried about the safety of their young sons that they sent them out to the country for the summer to the farm of a fellow Latvian, where they thought the air would be better. Water was also suspected as the carrier of the polio virus (enlarged at the right). One summer when several classmates at Ingomar School got sick, my mother nixed all trips to North Park swimming pool for me, believing Windwood in Bradford Woods to be less dangerous.

Of course, the “poster child” for polio wasn’t a child at all, but the President of the United States, Franklin Roosevelt. He contracted polio at age 39 in August 1921 after visiting a Boy Scout jamboree during a vacation at Campobello Island. Until 1945, when he died of a cerebral hemorrhage, he never regained the use of his legs; his struggle with the disease contributed to public awareness and to financial support for polio research from the March of Dimes (over $2.5 million). FDR's personality also aided the perception that polio could be conquered.

Those photos of the poor kids consigned to iron lungs with only their heads visible were poignant images to me. “Iron lung” was just the common name for the negative pressure ventilator that mimicked the physiological action of breathing: by periodically altering pressure, it caused air to flow in and out of weakened lungs.

The Local Angle

Kluger’s book traces the life of Jonas Salk (1914 -1995). He was born in New York City, the eldest of three sons of Russian Jewish immigrants from Minsk (Belarus) who were garment workers. An intense, no-nonsense boy, Jonas attended City College of New York and NYU Medical School in pursuit of a career in medical research. After graduation and an internship at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan, he spent 5 years in Ann Arbor at the University of Michigan developing an influenza vaccine in the laboratory of Dr. Thomas Francis (who received most of the recognition for this achievement).

This slight rankled Salk, and when he was offered a position in virology at the University of Pittsburgh’s Medical School, he accepted immediately. The salary of $7,500 a year was 50% more than he had been paid at Michigan. It was also his chance to build his own lab. He didn’t decide to focus on creating a vaccine to prevent polio until after he started in autumn 1947.

What amazes me was the decision by Jonas and his wife Donna to rent a house at the intersection of Perry Highway and Maple Drive in Wexford. Jonas had his heart set on a home in the country with his own vegetable garden. In those days how many New York Jews chose such a gentile stronghold as the northern suburbs as a place to settle? And why would someone who spent 12+ hours per day in his lab in Oakland want to take on that commute? (Remember in those days there wasn’t even McKnight Road, let alone Rt. 279.) It wasn’t for the school system because Salk drove his sons to Sewickley Academy in his Studebaker on the way to the lab. And when would he have time to tend a garden anyway?

Although the cases of polio in the U.S. more than doubled between 1945 and 1946, the summers between 1947 and 1951 were even worse. Finally 1952 broke all records—57,879 cases reported. That summer things were so bad in Pittsburgh even attendance at Forbes Field dropped. But Salk and his team were closing in on an effective vaccine. He was confident enough of its safety that among the first children in the entire country to be inoculated were his own three sons—Peter (9), Darrell (6), and Jonathan (3). Salk brought his kit bag of syringes home and the first administering of the wonder vaccine occurred inWexford.

After 6 years, in autumn 1953 when the demands of the lab were especially heavy and field trails of the vaccine were underway, the Salks left Wexford and moved to a house 7 minutes from the lab. Still, Salk had a soft spot for his old neighborhood. Despite his grueling schedule, he agreed to be dedication speaker for our new high school.

I recommend Kluger’s book if you are interested in the details of how medical breakthroughs are made and the personalities and politics involved. Throughout the course of vaccine development, the rivalry between Salk and the older, imperious researcher Albert Sabin is described. Eventually Sabin’s live-virus vaccine administered orally supplanted Salk’s killed-virus injections. In 1962, Salk left Pittsburgh and moved to La Jolla, California, where he established the Salk Institute for Biological Studies (taking some of his Pittsburgh colleagues with him). There he worked until his death (age 80) in 1995 on more polio vaccine research as well as studying multiple sclerosis and AIDS.

In 2000, after his death, the Center for Disease Control ruled that to eliminate the final lingering cases of polio in the U.S., Sabin’s vaccine would be phased out and replaced by Salk’s more effective killed formulation. The polio virus is nearly extinct today, and those scary epidemic years of our childhood now a dusty corner of medical history. (Incidentally, Jonas never received a Nobel Prize but he was rewarded by his three adoring sons all becoming physicians. They still live and work on the West Coast.

NAHS’s Contribution

My husband’s recent hospital sojourn made me think of the women in the Class of 1958 who chose nursing as a career. It is a vital, care-giving service rarely portrayed adequately on TV hospital series like “E.R.,” “House,” or “Chicago Hope,” where doctors, residents and interns dominate the speaking roles and nurses occasionally provide love interest but that’s all. We hear of the nursing shortage, the lack of proper funding for nursing schools, and the baby boomers will soon require more health care.

I knew early on that I was not made of the stern stuff that is required to tackle such a career, but I am deeply grateful to my classmates who were. I want to salute them: Norma Darling Goettmann, Carol Dingfelder Renner, Pat Henke Sexauer, Kathy Humphreys Oswald, Karen O’Connell Loeber, Judy Roth Morris, Grace “Rusty” Sherman, Ruth Ann Slack Scuticchio, Lois Sloan Mounsey, and Susan Tate Hurley. (Please let me know if I’ve forgotten anyone.)

The Moviegoer

Fifty years ago today was my 18^th birthday. It seems all week I’ve been hearing about birthdays—on the 15th, Harry Potter’s friend, Hermione (Emily Watson) turned 18; on the 16^th, Pope Benedict XVI turned 81, on the 17^th, Bob Beilstein celebrated his 68^th, the 18^th was Conan O’Brien’s 45^th, and the 19^th, moi. And according to today’s newspaper, tomorrow on April 20, Edna Parker of Shelbyville, Indiana, the world’s oldest person, will turn 115. The same newspaper also carried an AP story about recent sociological research revealing “the happiest Americans are the oldest.” That should help me keep my longevity in perspective.

For the life of me, I can’t remember exactly how I celebrated on April 19, 1958. Probably the best present I received that week was the letter from the Allegheny College Admissions Office letting me know I was accepted. That year April 19 also fell on a Saturday, so a good guess is that I did what I most enjoyed on a Saturday night: I went on a movie date.

Getting dressed up and going into downtown Pittsburgh to a first-run theater— now that was really a first-class evening in my book. I fondly remember those movie palace’s: the Stanley, Fulton, Loew’s Penn, and Warner—the Loew’s Ritz on 5^th had closed a few years earlier, and the Art Cinema was far too risqué in those days (although I did sneak furtive looks at its posters on shopping days on my way down Liberty Ave. to the Harmony bus station).

I loved those early 20^th-century facades on the theaters and the absurd decadence of the interiors: ushers wore maroon uniforms; there were red plush chairs in the lobby, marble staircases led to the balcony (remember Loew’s Penn?), crystal chandeliers, and vaulted ceilings with ornate designs in the plaster. Even a trip down the thick carpeted stairs to the restrooms provided more opulence. When I was inside those theaters, I always felt I was born too late and had missed out on the decades when Pittsburgh was really voluptuous. (Little realizing that 50 years later none of these cinema's would even exist as I knew them. They would either be gentrified into the Benedum Center (Stanley), Pittsburgh Cultural Trust’s Byham (Fulton, see interior photo above), Heinz Hall (Loew’s Penn), or totally wrecked by a 2-story shopping center sold at sheriff sale in 2005 (Warner, see below). Ironically, the former porn peddler, the Art Cinema (at the right), has been refurbished by Pittsburgh Filmmakers as Harris Theater now showing arty films.

I also liked waiting behind the cordon of gold braid while the last audience filed out from the movie we were about to see. I watched for their reactions: tears, smiles, and chatting to each together was good, if they stared ahead blankly, I feared the worst. Then we entered the magic darkened world, my eyes riveted to the big screen, and the totality of escape from everything else began for a few hours.

I’m not sure which movies would have been playing in Pittsburgh on April 19, 1958. We might have gone to “Bridge on the River Kwai,” which had recently won 7 Oscars or “South Pacific,” released in March. I know I saw “Gigi” that summer (at the Warner—after they finally gave up showing those plot-less Cinerama features). Other films on my list that year included Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” “Auntie Mame,” “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” “Long, Hot Summer,” “Sayonara,” and “Three Faces of Eve.” I doubt we went to “Peyton Place.” I’d sneaked home a copy of Metalious' novel the previous year (probably in a paper bag to avoid my mother’s scrutiny), and I knew they’d sanitize the movie.

* * *

I realize I have a lot more to say about other movie memories (those Laurel & Hardy’s we watched in Ingomar School when we weren’t in ballroom dancing class. The matinees of oaters at the Girard and Perry Theaters. And those pits of iniquity, the drive-ins—Starlite in Wexford, Ranalli’s on Route 8, and Brookside down in the Franklin Twp. valley). But, hey, it’s my birthday and I need to go celebrate!

Just in parting, I’m providing a link to a cute poem "The Land that Made Me Me" (author unknown) that Marge Downer Arciniega sent me (click here). Hope you like it as much as I did.

When North Allegheny Was the New High School

Classmate Terry McMahon reminded me of one of the things that makes the class of 1958 so special: When we graduated from the 4-year-old North Allegheny, we were the first class to go the whole way through. We never got shipped from “the country” to attend high school elsewhere. Terry says once when he told this factoid to his daughter, she asked if the school had dirt floors! Terry quickly set her straight—that North Allegheny Junior-Senior High School (as Dr. Vonarx never ceased to call it) was more modern than the school she was then attending.

The first two NAHS graduating classes (1956 and 1957) spent one or two years at Pittsburgh’s Perry High, still located at the corner of East Street and Perrysville Avenue looking much as it did in the 1950s. Before Perry, North Alleghenians were bussed down Perry Highway to West View High School, which was closer but became too crowded to take the country kids by 1951. In fact, Ross Township and the borough of West View built North Hills High School on Rochester Road shortly after NAHS.

The post-war boom led many families to flee the cities and move to the suburbs. Not until 1947, after war production ended, did Pittsburgh start to enforce smoke control ordinances. My parents bought a 1910, foreclosed house on Ingomar Road as a fixer-upper with a homeowner’s loan. They could never have afforded it before the Federal Housing Agency was created in 1934. The first day I skipped across the street to Ingomar School, my mom threw herself into PTA, Girl Scouts, and all manner of civic endeavors. I still remember the 100 dogwood saplings filling up our driveway one April. The PTA was selling them as a fund-raiser, the brainchild of my mom, who believed they would eventually turn Ingomar into a springtime paradise.

Near the end of the 1940s, the semi-rural communities 12 miles north of Pittsburgh began talking about cooperating to build their own high school. Eventually, the townships of McCandless, Franklin, and Marshall and the borough of Bradford Woods established a joint school district. (Since then, some municipal structures have changed: it’s now the borough of Franklin Park and the Town of McCandless.) Originally, Pine was included in the plans, but after a vote among that township’s citizenry, the kids from Pine and Richland continued to attend Mars High School. (The consensus was the location of the new high school in McCandless was just too far from them.)

In Spring 1952, ground was broken for the new high school across Cumberland Road and down the hill from St. John’s Lutheran Church (both the old—soon to become Cumberland Community Center—and the new), as this photo from The Allegheny Journal recorded it.

Caption: “BELIEVE IT OR NOT, the scene (left) was snapped just 2-1/2 years ago from almost the same spot as the view of the completed North Allegheny High School. It shows the crowd gathering for the groundbreaking ceremony on March 22, 1952, when the present site of the high school was a virgin blackberry patch.”

By then, local grade schools were bulging at the seams from the postwar baby boom. We 7^th graders from Ingomar and Bradford Woods were bussed over to Franklin Elementary for a year when our schools could no longer hold us. The following year, construction of the new high school had proceeded to the point where 7^th and 8^th grades of the entire North Allegheny school district could be housed together in the unfinished building—consisting of part of the main hall and three ramps farthest from the auditorium, closest to the shop. During the 1953-54 school year, we shared the construction site with carpenters, plasterers, electricians, and other workers who were building the school around us. Today OSHA might never have allowed it—or at least might have required us to wear hard hats and safety goggles.

The new school’s grand opening came early in the 1954-55 school year. After being cocks of the walk for the previous year, suddenly we were lowly 9^th graders. The intruding 10^th and 11^th graders arrived from Perry (while the 12^th graders from the district remained to graduate at Perry). It must have been quite a hiring fair to interview, screen, and select so many new teachers at once. Many of them were fresh from college and proceeded to energize the place. Did we really appreciate what a great opportunity this was for us?

Some of Our Perks

As Terry also remembered, “being part of a new school, we got to pick school colors, black and gold, and a school mascot, the tiger. I remember
the voting was between those chosen above, and black and green as school colors, and the alligator as mascot.”

A new school anthem had to be written (“We hail North Allegheny, its colors black and gold. Its modern beauty fills us with a joy that’s yet untold…and pledge our loyalty, etc.”) and a fight song for sports events (Tiger Rag). The names we gave to the newspaper (The North Star) and yearbook (Safari) continue today.

Terry says, “I played basketball for NAHS for four years, and during that first year with no seniors, we got killed. Didn't win a game; didn't even come close. I think we were like 22 losses and zero victories. But yet there was a silver lining for me: I got to play as a freshman, and Chuck Horne, our basketball coach, took me under his wing and really shaped my future.”

Lucky Us

G.B. Shaw is supposed to have said, “Youth is wasted on the young.” When I think of our good fortune in attending such a magnificent, state-of-the-art school, I fear we were not nearly grateful enough. In part, it was because we hadn’t spent any time at another school and had nothing to compare it with. The thought that soothes my conscience is imagining how our parents probably felt, how proud they must have been of this accomplishment. They are the age cohort that Tom Brokaw has called “the Greatest Generation,” because they came of age and endured the Great Depression, contributed (either in uniform or at home) to the World War II effort, and devoted the post-war years to building a stable country for their children (us).

Under the headline from the October 21, 1954 Allegheny Journal “North Allegheny School Ready for Dedication,” the lead article (excerpted below) captures some of their earnest pride. (Incidentally, reporter Peg Sweeney, my mom, wrote the story.)

Dr. Jonas Salk, famed discovered of the polio vaccine, which today offers such high hopes to parents everywhere, will be the principal speaker at the Dedication Services of the new North Allegheny Junior-Senior High School on Sunday afternoon, October 24, 1954, at 2 p.m. Dr. Salk has just returned from the International Conference on Polio in Rome, Italy, where he gave a paper before medicos from all over the world. It is seldom that his full schedule will permit of Dr. Salk’s speaking to lay groups but his interest in education is keen and the joint efforts of these North Allegheny communities to build a superior high school captured his imagination during the period of his former residence in this area. Dr. Salk moved into Pittsburgh from Perry Highway less than a year ago.

Dr. Thomas E. Carson, supervising principal of NAJSD, will preside at the dedication exercises. Although others have made great contributions, it has been said that Dr. Carson has probably done more than any other one individual during the past 6 years to make North Allegheny High School the splendid reality that it will become officially with its dedication next Sunday.

Others to appear on the platform on Sunday will be James A. Mitchell of Mitchell & Ritchey, Architects, will speak briefly on “Planning and Designing a High School.” Authority President Roy S. Thomas, Sr. will comment on “Building a High School.” Ivan Hosick, president of the Joint School Board, will point briefly to “A High School in Our Community.” Dr. A. W. Beattie, superintendent of Allegheny County schools, will touch on the aspects of “A New High School for Allegheny County.” M. Wayne Vonarx, high school principal, will discuss “The High School and You.”

The address by Dr. Salk will conclude the formal service, after which groups will be guided through the building by members of a committee consisting of 20 teachers, 20 parents, and 20 students. Mrs. Mary Letzkus is general chairman of the committee. Mrs. Robert van der Voort is chairman of the parent group. Building visitation will continue from the close of the ceremony until 6 p.m.

The dinner on Monday evening at 6:30 p.m. has been planned and sponsored by the Parent’s Association. …Tickets are limited to the seating capacity of the Cafeteria where it will be served. [I’ll skip the details other than to mention that the social chairman for the event was “Mrs. Don Rudolf, PE 4-8660,” Karen’s mom.]

Open House observances will continue through Tuesday and Wednesday evenings between 7 to 10 p.m. so that all interested persons will have an opportunity to see the new school—and maybe go back and take a second look if they can’t cover it all on one occasion.

The Boys of Summer in Ingomar

“In baseball the object is to go home! And to be safe!—George Carlin from his stand-up routine about the merits of Baseball versus Football (if you’d like to hear him perform it, go to YouTube; or if you don’t have sound, you can read it at www.baseball-almanac.com/humor7.shtml

“Play Ball!” cried umpires across the country this week, and my thoughts, like the first pitch, curved low and outside to a home plate long ago. My sincere enthusiasm for America’s National Pastime doesn’t extend to the professional leagues—not in 1947 and especially not in 2007. In 1947, my parents took me to my first baseball game at Forbes Field. The Pirates were playing the first-place Brooklyn Dodgers. I wasn’t savvy enough to appreciate then the historic figures I was watching: for the Bums, Jackie Robinson at 1^st base (Rookie of the Year), Peewee Reese at short, and Duke Snider in the outfield, while the Bucs had home-run slugger Ralph Kiner in their lineup.

The Pirates got trounced (no surprise in those days), but the thing that impressed me most about the game was when someone hit a high flying foul ball up into the stands. Suddenly, my dad and the men around us were on their feet. Daddy was holding up the felt hat he worn to the park and shouting, “I’ve got it! I’ve got it!” Chaos reigns while I slouched down in my seat, and in the melee, my mom said in a rather annoyed tone, “No. I got it.” The ball had clunked her on the bean before ricocheting into Daddy’s hat.

Uncle Cy, who was listening to the game back home on the radio, told us later that the announcer had reported, “Now the man’s giving the baseball to the little girl, and the medics are escorting the woman to the first aid station. She seems to be walking without assistance.” My mother eventually came back clutching an ice bag to her temple, and the rest of the game was uneventful. Out of the experience I got an official National League baseball—white with hardly a scuff to the leather— and a lifelong fear of foul balls. Ever afterward whenever I’d hear that certain crack of the bat and see the first baseman looking skyward to his left toward the bleachers, I instinctively ducked.

But I do love the amateur game of baseball where youngsters learn teamwork and strategy while developing a combination of athletic skills—throwing, catching, and hitting a ball; running, sliding, stealing bases, and of course, spitting. If you’ve heard George Carlin’s routine about the difference between football and baseball, you’ve heard some of the reasons I prefer the latter.

My partiality for baseball is because it was so much a part of everyday life in my youth. Our house was directly across the street from Ingomar Elementary School and its big ole clay baseball diamond. My mother cursed the dust that blew over from it and coated living room furniture during dry spells. Few evenings in the spring or summer didn’t have a league game, a practice, or at least 3 kids playing One Old Cat, as my uncle watched from the front porch glider.

In the early 1950s a phenomenon swept the neighborhood, thanks to a short Texan with tall ambitions and amazing stamina named Addison A. Vestal (and known to us as Bill’s dad), who rapidly created an empire, the Ingomar Athletic Association. Little League baseball arrived, and soon we were seeing organized leagues for all ages over at the field: Little (age 9-12), with its minor division (7-11), Pony (13-14), Colt (15-16), and North Allegheny Prep (15 and older).

In 1953, the first year of Little League play, Mr. Vestal asked me to keep the score along with his daughter, Gwen. Perhaps he was experiencing early feminist stirrings (nowadays I believe Little League has a girl’s softball division). We served an internship that year under the guidance of E. G. Roessler (Ernie’s dad, sometimes referred to as “Big Ernie”) since our judgment was not immediately trusted to record the finer details of errors, unearned runs, and sacrifice flies.

Apparently it worked out well enough because in future years, I continued to be a scorekeeper along with other teenage girls, sitting behind the batting cage for a good view of the diamond while recording the game details (in pencil) in the official scoring book. I remember among my scoring colleagues were Carolyn Kummer, my Ingomar best friend of all times; Suann Lively; Janet Gilleland; and Nancy Hannan. I don’t believe Ingomar field ever had a scoreboard with runs posted for all to see. That came later when Mr. Vestal built the Little League field down by Pine Creek. At Ingomar, if you wanted to know the score, you just asked whoever was already sitting up on the grassy bank to the right of the field. Benches were few and most were not good vantage points. It was never a problem. Mrs. Hannan (Chuck’s mother) always knew the score.

When thinking about those sandlot games, invariably I see not just Nancy and her ever-present mom, but the entire Hannan family. They were (and to my mind, still are) the perfect baseball family. Bob Jr. (catcher) and Chuck (shortstop) were great team players, always picked for the all-star teams; their dad, Bob Sr., was the unflappable coach of the Wexford Pony League team and later manager of North Allegheny Prep League Indians (coached by NAHS’ Lyle Fox). Brothers David was a few years younger and little Billy served as batboy when he was not much bigger than the equipment he was dragging around. The Hannons epitomized good sportsmanship, calmness, and devotion to the game. I think the only time I ever saw Mr. Hannan lose his temper was when he was coaching our 1955 Prep All-Star team; the opposing side was Munhall, where the game was played. As I wrote in my scrapbook afterward, “We lost to Munhall, who became world champs (chumps). Will always remember the umpire who was a ‘homer’ and Mr. Hannan getting kicked out of the game when the Munhall management refused to turn on the lights during the last 2 innings.”

The “Boys of Summer” were the 1955 Brooklyn Dodgers in Roger Kahn’s book by that name. Below I’m listing my boys of summer (c. 1953-58), but only those from the NAHS class of 1958. Many more had their hits, runs, and alas, errors recorded in my scorebook. Please tell me if I’ve missed anyone:

Little League (1953); Chuck Hannan, Ernie Roessler, and Bill Vestal (who always batted 4^th, for good reason).

Pony League (1954): the first-place Wexford team had Chuck and Ernie plus Paul Mahoney, Bob Richard, and Bob Schmieler; Ingomar had Bill and Arthur "Pete" Brandt; Fairhill had Chuck Gruber and Arnie Huwar; and Highland had Ron Huch.

Colt League (1956): in addition to those already mentioned were Bob Beilstein, Tom Brunt, Ed Florak, Mike McKay, Jack Miller, and Ken Nagie.

Many of the guys above also played for the Indians in the North Allegheny Prep League, plus John Allardice and Ron Sutter.