Summer, 1916

There was a time when a black car with lacquered doors would not have attracted much attention on East 106th Street—but that was before the cars started coming to take the babies away. The mothers of New York learned to avoid a lot of things that summer: the nurses at the edges of the playgrounds; the policemen with their leaflets; the crowds in the streetcars and the food on the pushcarts and the water in the rivers with its odd, loamy smell. But most of all, they learned to avoid the black cars.

Like all the mothers on her small block, Dora Salk would have frozen when the car rounded the corner from Madison Avenue and began cruising slowly down 106th Street. Automobiles were an increasingly common sight even in the neighborhoods so far from midtown; 116,000 of them were now registered in the city and up to 5,000 new owners sometimes signing up in a single month. But when the doors bore the seal of the City of New York and the car was slowing and speeding as it drifted past houses—a sure sign of a driver checking for an address—it meant trouble.

The city would claim, of course, that there was no reason at all to fear the black cars. They were sent only to find—and care for—the babies who had begun exhibiting the flushed look and wobbly limbs so characteristic of the unfolding plague. But caring for the babies in that limp and logy summer often as not meant sending them on a mandatory trip to Swineburne Island or one of the other facilities the city had set up to isolate the newly afflicted. There the babies might recover—or might not.

Certainly, measures as extreme as the cars and the island facility weren't necessary every year. Sure as crocuses, the paralysis would arrive whenever the warm weather did, twisting bodies and ruining families with a randomness that confounded even the best doctors. Some summers, the contagion would be mild, claiming a comparatively small crop of luckless children and then moving on. Other summers, the character of the disease would turn far blacker. Once alighted, it would range out everywhere, swallowing neighborhoods whole until the arrival of autumn and the sudden drop in temperature at last cooled its frenzy. It had happened that way back in 1907, and now, nine years later, it appeared to be happening again.

At first, most people thought less about the plague descending again this summer than about the news from the other side of the Atlantic. There the nations of Europe were deep in the war that had been bleeding the continent for two years now. Spill enough European blood and before long the call would start going out for Americans to come over and spill some of their own. That was what was on the minds of New Yorkers that season when the first indications of the paralysis started to appear.

It was cardboard placards that initially brought the news of the epidemic, official signs that began appearing on houses around the city like ugly paper boils.

"INFANTILE PARALYSIS," the signs would announce in block letters, and then, parenthetically, the more bookish name: "Poliomyelitis." The warning that followed was always the same:

All persons not occupants of

these premises are advised of the

presence of Infantile Paralysis in

it and are advised not to enter.

The person having Infantile

Paralysis must not leave the apart-

ment until the removal of this no-

tice by an employee of the Depart-

ment of Health.

 

By order of the BOARD OF HEALTH

When more than a few houses on a single street were infected, the whole block would be required to wear the warning mark. "Infantile paralysis is very prevalent in this part of the city. Keep off this street."

After the placards appeared, the nurses did too, and in their own way, they were even more fearsome. At first a welcome sight, they showed up in the playgrounds and parks, wandering up to mothers and children with friendly reminders of where the closest milk stations were—summer being a hard season in which to keep milk fresh and the babies needing plenty of it to stay strong. The few mothers who weren't attracted by the promise of milk might be drawn by the tickets for free ice, great blocks of the pricey stuff, enough to keep your food and milk chilled for days, if only you'd accompany the nurse to one of the city's designated pick-up points. The ice and the milk would always be at the stations as promised, but while you were on your way, you could be sure the nurse would be eyeing your babies for signs of paralysis, signs that could be reported to the Board of Health and earn the baby another free ticket, this one off to Swineburne Island.

The mothers soon caught wise to this and the nurses disappeared, only to be replaced by the policemen, this time offering fliers filled with tips on how to keep babies safe from the illness. The fliers were tempting, but by now the mothers were wary, and simply began avoiding the playgrounds altogether, walking with their babies only on the streets in front of their homes and darting inside at the first sign of trouble. Hiding would do you little good, however, the day the black lacquered car drove stopped at your door.

* * * * * * * * *

Most nice days—at least until the start of that summer—Dora Salk made it a point to be out of the house early, promenading her 20-month-old son Jonas before the day grew too warm. Dora was not the most popular mother on the block, perhaps because she was too good a mother. Her house would be cleaned by early morning and by 9:00 A.M., she and Jonas would be taking their constitutional. As the other mothers emerged at 10:00 or 11:00 or even later—their less-fresh, less-plump toddlers in tow—Dora would have nothing but cordial words for them, but it seemed a cordiality bred out of a belief that her day was one being better, more profitably spent. Dora was always the first on the block to get her washing in, her shopping done, and her errands run, and when the other ladies' husbands would come home in the evenings and they would hurry off to finish preparing dinner, Dora would make a bit of a show of ambling home slowly.

"All the rushing for supper," she'd say. "Mine is finished and warming."

Mornings on 106th Street had been a decidedly more relaxed time of day until the black cars started showing up. Mothers would stiffen as the driver approached her address—and then go weak in relief as he passed. Finally, the car would slow in front of one door and the doctor would get out. If he got out alone, that was considered a good sign.

Mothers did not surrender their sick babies easily, often kicking and cursing the city physicians as soon as they arrived. Things typically went a bit smoother if a social worker came along, since the mothers seemed more inclined to turn a child over to a woman than to a man. The absence of a social worker usually meant that the doctor did not intend to take the sick child away, though lately that had become an unreliable sign since, as the epidemic progressed, the city's overworked health department simply had fewer of the ladies to spare. Alone or accompanied, the doctor would walk quickly up the steps to the house, casting a fast glance at the knot of mothers who stood avoiding his eyes.

The first thing the doctor would do when he entered a paralysis house was look around the parlor to determine if the father had taken to sleeping there. If he had, that would count in the family's favor. The rules of the plague required that at the initial signs of illness, the child and the mother retreat to the family bedrooms and stay there until the infectious phase of the disease had passed. The father, who would have to continue working and otherwise moving through the community, was to isolate himself as well as he could. This meant that he was not to go up the stairs—beyond carrying up food and other essentials—and the mother and child were not to come down until there was no risk of either of them carrying the contagion further.

If a cot and clothes in the parlor convinced the doctor that the father was complying with the regulations, he would next go up to the bedrooms to examine the patient. The scene that greeted him there would almost always be a bleak one. By June, it was proving to be a punishing summer, with temperatures typically rising high into the 80s before noon and staying fixed there until well after sundown. The bedrooms of poliomyelitis patients would often be stifling, since the windows would be closed against the blueflies, stable flies, and houseflies that were widely suspected of carrying the virus. The Health Department permitted quarantined families to open their windows if they had metal screens in place, but screens were expensive and not always available.

In the room, the doctor would first ask the mother to describe how the child's illness had struck, though the answer would almost always be the same—the same fever, the same chills, the same sudden loss of strength. Then he'd turn to the patient, feeling the child's head and neck to determine if there was any fever. He'd move the legs and arms to see if there was any pain. He'd bend the legs at the knees and ask the child to push back to see if there was any lingering strength in the muscles. Then he'd lay the limbs back down.

If he determined that the disease was still burning inside the child and that the parents had been sloppy about the quarantine rules, he'd interpose himself between the mother and the bed and gather the child up, prepared to fight the curses and kicks of the woman as he did. Carrying the child downstairs, he'd hope the father would restrain the mother—to say nothing of himself—so that he could take the patient to the car with a minimum of unpleasantness. If necessary, he would summon his driver whom he'd have left behind the wheel for assistance. If that didn't work, he'd summon the police.

If, on the other hand, the doctor found that the fever had passed and that the house was well-sealed against leakage of the virus, he'd leave the home in peace. The disease, after all, would by now be through with the child, having entered and left, cutting a hot path through the spinal cord along the way. The wasted legs might never be of any use again, but the child would no longer be a danger to anyone else.

If the doctor did announce that the child could stay, the mother would cover her face with her hands in relief. When the doctor clumped back down the stairs with no child in his arms, the grateful father might offer up an impulsive gift. The cigar man would insist that the doctor take a cigar; the boot man would offer him laces; the baker would offer a ring of cake. They'd press the unwanted gifts on the doctor and he would mostly take them. Once in his car, he'd pass them onto his driver.

* * * * * * * * *

Dora Salk—or Dora Press as folks once knew her—was surely not worrying about poliomyelitis or any other illness when she first arrived in New York City at the turn of the 20th century. It was in Minsk, where she had been born, that you worried about paralysis and pox and other such plagues. In New York, you worried about getting rich.

There were a lot of things the 12-year-old Dora didn't know how to do very well when she landed in New York—write and write English among them. But she knew how to speak it passably well—well enough that when she was careful, you didn't even always hear the Russian inflections. That kind of quick learning was more than enough to impress the men who did the hiring in the factories in the midtown garment district and land her a steady job doing cut-and-stitch work. She performed so well in that position that by the time she was 16 or so, the factory supervisor realized that the short, slight girl with the sharp voice and the crisp way might be even better suited to overseeing a team of other women doing the same kind of piecework she did, never mind that the women she'd be supervising would be two or even three times her age.

It was when she was working in her new job that the quick and driven Dora Press met the gentle and pleasant Daniel Salk, another garment worker who designed lace scarves and collars, and whose fine, filigreed work was matched only by his fine, filigreed temperament. A quiet man was perfectly alright with Dora—as long as that quiet man earned a respectable living, and Daniel did. The two young garment workers soon married, and Dora happily left her never well-loved job. She promptly turned her ferocious attention to making a sharp and spotless home out of their flat on the upper end of Manhattan, getting it ready for the children she intended to have before long—the first of whom, Jonas, arrived in 1914.

For a woman who conducted her affairs so tidily, it was an unsettlingly messy development when the summer of 1916 arrived and the city suddenly began publishing reports of the spreading infantile paralysis problem. The blaze was burning in Brooklyn and now spreading toward Manhattan. Keeping up with the newspaper dispatches about the epidemic was not easy for Dora, still struggling to unknot printed English. An inability to read the local language was not something the proud Dora was inclined to admit and she'd developed ways to conceal the problem when she was outside her home.

"Can you help me read that?" she'd ask a passerby, affecting a nearsighted squint at a street sign. "I don't know why they make those letters so small."

Behind closed doors, things were different. When word of the paralysis started getting around, she instructed Daniel to read her every report he found in the newspapers on how babies could be protected from the scourge. What she learned, she put straight to work in her home.

Young Jonas was kept impeccably clean; his nose and throat were regularly rinsed with a solution of one teaspoon of salt to one quart of warm water, a mixture that was said to prevent the polio virus from gaining purchase in the throat membranes. The foods in Dora's kitchen were always kept covered and while everyone in the family ate well, none of them ate too much meat or sugar—such dense foods weighing too heavily on the gut and weakening the constitution. Most important of all, Dora would see to it that her clean, strong, well-nourished son was kept away from other children—with their questionable hygiene and diets and the germs they might be spreading to anyone who came near.

"Avoid the babies," Dora would warn Daniel each morning as he'd head off to his job.

"There are no babies at work," he'd answer.

"There are babies in the streets," she'd say. "There are babies in the carriages."

But as the summer ground on, it began to appear that merely avoiding the babies was not likely to make much difference for anyone in New York. The number of infected children in the city was growing beyond anything the Health Commissioner's office had ever considered possible. By the first of July, 350 children had contracted the paralysis and 75 of them had died. In one week alone, 52 new cases were reported—43 of them in Brooklyn and 9 in Manhattan.

New York was not alone in facing a contagion. Up and down the east coast, Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore, and other major cities were reporting outbreaks of their own. At least scattered cases appeared in 33 states. But so far, it was New York that was being hit the hardest, with one out of three cases anywhere in the country occuring within the boroughs that made up the city. Numbers that had already climbed so high in the relatively cool weeks of early summer would explode into the thousands in the steambath weeks of mid-July and August. Before that could happen, the city would have to crack down, and it would have to do so before July 4th.

The Fourth of July was a predictably festive day in New York, and this year, the city had big plans for the day, especially since the war news from Europe seemed to be cooperating. France and Great Britain had just mounted a major offensive against the Germans, reclaiming five French towns, advancing as much as six miles in some places, and capturing more than 12,300 prisoners. The events New York planned for the American independence day were well-suited to such bright developments, with more than 500 patriotic meetings to be held around the boroughs. Electric signs had been erected at City Hall and in Times Square, Columbus Circle, and City College Stadium, spelling out patriotic messages from the Mayor, the Governor, and President Wilson himself in incandescent bulbs that would blaze with the brightness of 55 million candles. A great deal of work had gone into planning such a day—and a great deal of it would now have to be undone.

On the afternoon of July 2nd, Health Commissioner Haven Emerson, known mostly for being the gentle great-nephew of author and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, called his assistants into his office in the Municipal Building on Center Street in Manhattan. It was a hot and gummy day, with the thermometer climbing to 84 degrees early and not showing any sign of falling. At the Polo Grounds on the northwestern edge of Manhattan, barely 15,000 people showed up to watch the Giants fall to the despised Brooklyn Dodgers, most of them leaving early to escape the afternoon sun. As often happened when the temperature rose, the paralysis bug thrived, and throughout that day, hospitals around the city were knocked back on their heels as 72 stricken children were rushed in for care by their parents. More than 20 of those patients already seemed certain to die. Emerson reviewed the numbers from both the hospitals and the weathermen and issued a series of orders.

Of the 60 biggest celebrations planned for the night of the fourth, 15 would be cancelled. Plans for city-sponsored open-air movies would also be scrapped. Children under 16 years of age would be banned from all places where large crowds gathered, including movie houses and theaters. Exhibitors or other businesses caught disobeying the new regulations would be stripped of their operator's licenses. More than half a million leaflets would immediately be printed and distributed, explaining, once again, how to follow the paralysis hygiene guidelines.

Emerson's rules went promptly into effect—and the polio bug slapped them aside. As the week pressed on and the temperature stayed high, 113 new cases checked into hospitals on July fifth and 87 followed on the sixth. For every five cases, at least one proved lethal within the first two days, as the muscles that controlled the children's breath failed along with the ones that controlled their arms and legs. When the weekend arrived, the numbers fell and parents were briefly hopeful. But it was a false hope, a result merely of spotty reporting as the case-counters in the hospitals took their Saturdays and Sundays off. When Monday arrived and the three-day toll was tallied, the count soared again.

In the neighborhoods, terrorized New Yorkers began freelancing solutions. Cats, many people concluded, were responsible for spreading the bug. And so cats were bludgeoned and drowned by the tens of thousands. When word got out that there was a bounty on the animals' heads, boys in Brooklyn rounded them up and brought them hissing and scratching to the Board of Health. When that word turned out to be a mere rumor, the boys killed the cats themselves. In houses where polio had already struck, the animals were murdered with special fury, flung by rage-blind parents into the rivers—sometimes when the cats were already dead, sometimes when they were still alive.

More than 70,000 cats were killed that week, but even after they were gone, the epidemic roared on. If cats weren't responsible, the people concluded, perhaps mosquitoes were. If it wasn't mosquitoes, it was rats or sewers or the always-dirty Gowanus Canal. New Yorkers called, cabled, and wrote the Department of Health with all manner of other things they were certain were causing the paralysis plague, including high ground water, ice cream cones, excavations, flies, bedbugs, street dust, corn flakes, the subway, parasites in the water, alloys in cooking utensils, gasses from munitions factories, the bent-over position children assumed at school desks, mercury poisoning, white clothing, earthquakes, volcanoes, electrical disturbances, sunburn, intestinal derangements, second-hand bedding, decayed food, excessive glare, unclean milk bottles, carrying coins in the mouth, and tobacco.

With so many possible sources of infection, more and more people decided to quit the city altogether. In railroad terminals in all the boroughs, mothers and children who had the means began fleeing in numbers that, judging by railroad ticket sales, exceeded 50,000. The actual count was probably far higher, since children under five travelled for free, meaning that there was no complete tally of just how fast the city was hemorrhaging its young. For all this, the paralysis count still climbed. In the first full week of July, 552 children fell ill; in the second week, the tally approached 1,000.

Emerson had seen enough. If the virus was going to be stopped, city physicians could not do it by themselves. Much of the burden would have to fall on private doctors, the ones who more often that not were the first to see the newly infected patients. If the doctors were to be relied on for such a job, however, they were going to have to know how to do it.

Most medical men knew little about infantile paralysis beyond what they learned from books—which meant they knew almost nothing useful at all. They knew the mossy tales of the ancient carving of an Egyptian boy with a dropped foot, a shrivelled leg, and a walking stick, suggesting the disease had been around for as long as 3,500 years. They knew the great names of the great scientists who had studied the problem in modern times: The German Jacob von Heine, who had first written about the disease in 1840; Oskar Karl Medin, the Swede who built on Heine's work, describing a local polio outbreak that claimed 44 children in 1887, and first suggesting that the disease had just the kind of contagious character that could lead to epidemics if communities weren't careful. Later came Ivar Wickman, a pupil of Medin, who studied the victims of a Swedish epidemic in 1905 that claimed 1,000 children and concluded that the disease was caused by germs associated with sneezing, coughing, and wastes from the bowel.

The New York doctors of 1916 knew too all of the names by which infantile paralysis had variously been known: teething paralysis, since that was the time of life at which it so often struck; paralysis of the morning, since that was the time of day the immobility often appeared; essential paralysis, since medical men appeared to need a name that sounded more sober and well-informed than the other two. They also knew the current preferred term: poliomyelitis. The name came from the Greek terms polios, for gray, and myelos, for matter, and referred to the vibrant core of gray matter that ran down the center of the spinal cord, which was the area that would be scored and scarred when a case of infantile paralysis struck.

But none of that book-learning equipped the New York physicians to do a thing to help the children falling ill with polio. Emerson thus put out word to the city's medical community as a whole: An informational meeting would be held the next afternoon in the auditorium of the Polhemus Clinic at the Long Island College Hospital. Any doctors who treated children were strongly urged to attend. Emerson had no power to make the meeting mandatory, but under the current circumstances, he did not expect he'd have to.

The next day was another thick and sticky one, but Polhemus Hall was full to the walls. Doctors crowded the small auditorium, taking seats if they could find them and standing when they couldn't. On the stage facing the assembled physicians were Emerson and Dr. Louis Ager, a juvenile medical specialist. Joining them was Dr. Simon Flexner of the Rockefeller Institute, the man the doctors were truly here to hear. A research physician, Flexner was famous for having been the first American scientist to isolate the polio virus. Other doctors had seen the withered muscle tissue, ruined spinal strands, and violated nerve cells the bug left behind. But Flexner had filtered out the virus itself, introduced it into pristine cells, and observed as those cells seized up and died.

Emerson rapped the table in front of him and called the doctors to order. He read the day's infection figures: 52 new cases in all—43 of them in Brooklyn, eight in Manhattan, and one in the Bronx. The totals were comparatively low but only because of incomplete reporting. The doctors muttered at the numbers and Emerson silenced them with a hand. With little preamble, he introduced Flexner, who walked to the podium to respectful applause and reviewed the state of the current outbreak.

Though the virus was showing its predictable preference for babies, Flexner reported, rising rates of infection among older children and even the occasional adult indicated that no one was completely safe. The mortality rate was holding steady at more than 20%, significantly higher than in past outbreaks. Autopsies showed that the children most likely to die were those whose medulla oblongota—a bulb at the base of the brain—was attacked, since it was that area that allowed the body to draw breath. Parents should continue to take pains with their children: Youngsters should be regularly bathed; parents should wash their hands immediately afterwards. Insects must be kept away from food; children must be kept away from insects. Sanitation, above all else, was imperative.

"Suppose a child kisses another?" a doctor asked.

Kissing could transmit the virus, Flexner explained, as could sneezing or coughing or anything else that carries secretions of the nose and throat from one person to another. Also to be guarded against were discharges from the intestines, flies, soiled linens, and dirty hands.

Was Flexner studying cures, one doctor wanted to know.

"There are no cures," he responded.

"What about wintergreen?" one doctor asked.

Flexner rolled his eyes. He'd heard about the wintergreen. "Wintergreen is not a cure or specific of any kind."

"Not by itself, no," the doctor persisted. "But mix it with Russian thyme and the oils of rosemary, cajiput, and wood and you get a paste that can soothe the muscles and promote movement." The muttering in the room rose again, shot through with a few snickers. The doctor raised his voice over it. "I've had 18 cases that the Health Department has certified poliomyelitis and I've not yet had to sign a single death certificate." The snickering continued and the doctor, scowling, sat down.

The meeting pressed on like that for the remainder of the morning and the better part of the afternoon, with questions being shouted up and answers coming down and Flexner, Emerson, and Ager repeating their hygiene message again and again. Finally, when the alternating bits of wisdom and hooey had all been addressed, the gathering at last broke up, and the doctors—smarter for the time they'd spent in the hall—were dispatched back into their communities to do their work.

The next day, the temperature in New York soared back into the high 80s, causing at least two reported cases of heat prostration on the city's sidewalks. Nearly 60 more children, many of them with well-bathed bodies and well-rinsed throats, contracted the sickness in just 24 hours. Twenty-five of them were dead within the day.

* * * * * * * * *

By August, polio brushfires were burning in at least 26 states across the nation. Even as the coastal cities continued to suffer, the epidemic grew in the west and south, where the warm temperatures and long summers were kindest to the virus. New York, however, remained at the center of the plague, with nearly half of the total number of cases. And those numbers showed no signs of falling. Just as things looked like they might be starting to improve in one borough, a fresh pocket of disease would appear in another. The moment it did, it would be spread back in all directions by the city's arterial array of bridges.

On the upper shoulder of Manhattan the paralysis circle was beginning to close tighter around Dora Salk's neighborhood. The black cars came for the McTiernan boy on 108th Street and the Zuckerman girl on 113th, the Schatzes' and the Engles' child on 99th and 100th and the Wisans' on 109th. Sometimes the doctors took the children away, sometimes they didn't. Always the neighborhoods were shaken in their wake.

Mothers of healthy children tried every possible preventative. Camphor, it had been said, could combat the bug, its powerful fumes protecting the nasal linings from infection. So mothers picked druggists' shelves clean of the five-cent cubes, hanging them around their children's necks like pungent charms. Other mothers, like Dora, tried more measured means. They raised the temperature of their laundry water to kill any hidden germs; they bagged the ashes from their coal stoves to keep the bug from hitching a ride on the dust; they swept their walks and the streets themselves to catch whatever danger might be hiding in ruts and gutters.

"Leave your shoes outside," Dora would remind Daniel each day as he'd return home from work.

"There are no germs on the sidewalks," he'd protest.

"Do you know that?" she'd ask.

Daniel, who had to admit he didn't know, would remove his shoes.

For all such precautions, the viral tide continued to climb. As the middle of August approached, a total of 6,369 cases had been counted in all the boroughs; Manhattan—which had come to the plague late—was home to more than 1,400 of them.

Finally, perhaps inevitably, New Yorkers began to go to war with the only enemies they had yet to battle: one another. More and more children who looked suspiciously feverish were being surreptitiously reported to the Department of Health by neighbors. Money or other resources collected in one neighborhood to treat victims of the disease were not released to other neighborhoods—even if the need was greater there. Health inspectors were attacked by neighborhood groups when they came to visit homes; when police accompanied the inspectors, they were set upon too. As the fear and fury grew, the collected tension of the terrible summer—contained for so long—finally sparked and blew. When it happened, it happened not within the afflicted city, but on a small spit of land out on Long Island.

If the children who had contracted infantile paralysis were going to be properly treated and studied, it would have to happen somewhere the air was relatively free of the virus, allowing doctors to attend to the stable patients without having to manage newly sick ones. For this reason, the wealthy summer residents of the Rockaway Peninsula decided to devote a bit of their fortune and a square of their land to building a facility that could do just this kind of work. The volunteer rich raised the money, retained the workmen, and arranged for a clean, wooden hospital building—equipped with proper electricity and proper plumbing—to be constructed before the end of August near the town of Woodmere. A medical staff was quickly recruited, lured by the promise of a tidy dormitory, a well-equipped laboratory, and the relief from the summer heat provided by the cool Long Island breezes.

As the hospital was being constructed, the year-round residents of the town began gathering at the work site and grumbling. The summer folks were building them a facility they hadn't asked for, one that would result in the town being overrun by a troop of infectious children. When the season was over, the benefactors themselves would decamp to their townhouses in Manhattan, and the people of Woodmere would be left to deal with the burden of their philanthropy.

The first patients were due to arrive on the last weekend in August, but before they could be admitted, the town board would have to meet to approve the hospital officially. That meeting was set for the Thursday evening before the weekend. When the selectmen arrived at the council hall on the appointed night, they found a swarm of locals waiting outside for them. When the officials entered the hall and took their seats at the council table, the crowd noisily followed.

The town council would be assisted in its work this evening by J. Howes Burton, a summer resident and the head of the civic group that had collected the funds for the hospital. It was Burton's job to argue for the facility, but it was Burton's type—with his wealth and his influence and his grand first initial—who most raised the hackles of the locals. The moment he took his seat on the panel, the crowd began to mutter. When he introduced himself and began to make his case for the new facility, the mutters turned to hoots. Burton tried to call out over the din, explaining—as the selectmen nodded along—that the children would be arriving only after the contagious phase of their disease had passed, thus benefitting from the care the facility could provide but posing no danger to anyone else. The crowd was not swayed. He argued that the work done in the new facility could eventually help all babies—perhaps even Woodmere's own. But the crowd was having none of it. Finally, Burton offered up the only argument he had left, and as soon as he raised it, he knew he had miscalculated badly.

"The hospital is on private grounds," he said. "And those who own the land can build what they will."

The selectmen winced and the room exploded in fist-shaking shouts. The chairman of the panel tried to hush the crowd, but the noise only grew louder. Stepping in, the Health Commissioner shouted out a hopeful compromise: The hospital would be opened as planned, he suggested, but it would receive only paralysis cases that originated in the villages of Woodmere and nearby Hewlett. Children from other local communities would not be welcome—to say nothing of those from the city. Relieved at this one small concession they could make, the selectmen huddled briefly, then gavelled the proposal into law and gavelled themselves out into the night.

The crowd erupted. Streaming from the town hall, they moved in a group to the neck of land where the hospital stood, its grounds still littered with the stuff of its construction. Only a few bulbs burned inside the wooden structure, shedding just a faint light on the surrounding grounds; the waters off Long Island sloshed blackly beyond the reach of the lamps. The crowd took up positions around the building, chanting and shouting that they would stand their posts for as long as it took to ensure that not a single paralysis patient entered the facility. Sheriffs from Hewlett, Woodmere, and Hempstead, who had attended the meeting out of concern for just this kind of disturbance and remained close to the crowd as it moved, kept the people from approaching the structure too closely, but pointedly did not order them to leave.

The town selectmen phoned for help, and a half dozen armed private detectives—some of whom worked as guards at the summer mansions—arrived and stationed themselves between the encircling group and the wooden building. The crowd responded by sending out runners and bringing in even more protesters, these armed with rakes and torches. The detectives responded by bringing in more of their own as well. Within a few hours, a restless ring of 600 locals faced off against an inner ring of 20 lawmen. The crowd occasionally probed the detectives' line with a feint with their rakes. The detectives responded with lunges of their own, for now keeping their hands off their weapons. At last, the protesters lit and raised their torches.

"This building will be burned before we'll see it used," one of them shouted.

"And those who burn will be arrested," a detective answered.

A protester stepped forward. "Anyone who attempts to take a patient into this hospital will be physically restrained," he threatened.

"If an employee of this hospital is attacked, the man responsible will be shot," a detective responded.

The detectives and the protesters glared at one another across the unmarked divide. And then, slowly, the rakes came down, the torches were lowered. Nobody was going to shoot anyone here; nobody was going to burn anything. This scene on this night was less about rage than about sorrow and fear, about the swelling army of baby ghosts growing in the distant boroughs and now stalking Long Island. There'd be no reclaiming the children who had been swept away, and no saving the ones still to die.

Gradually, the rings of people began to waver and dissolve; the detectives and the mob turned from one another and straggled wordlessly off.

Late the next day, a polio patient from the town of Woodmere was admitted to the hospital. That stricken child was followed by three others from nearby Inwood, and they in turn were followed by still others from a scatter of surrounding towns. Within days, the hospital was full. The staff of doctors in the fine wooden building never would come up with a way to help any of them.

* * * * * * * * *

Jonas Salk escaped the polio bug that summer. He turned two years old in October, the same month the weather at last grew cool and Dora Salk and the other mothers could draw a breath and begin to put the season of terror behind them. In the end, the doctors counted 27,000 cases of poliomyelitis around the country, 6,000 of them fatal. More than 9,300 of the total number of victims were New York children, and of those, more than 2,200 would never see another summer. Of the ones who lived, about half would walk away from the disease with little more than a weakened hand or an unsteady leg to remind them of the scourge they'd suffered.

The rest of the survivors—some 3,500 of them—would not be seen again until late autumn or winter, when they at last came wheeling or clanking out of the hospitals, their legs and hips caged in steel and leather braces they would need to wear for the rest of their lives. Even the cleverest of the boys and girls would need months to master the awkward appliances, not confidently balancing back up on their bolted and buckled legs until the next spring or later. By then, of course, the air in the city would already be starting to grow warm again, and from somewhere in the sticky south—where all the wild things grew—the poliovirus would begin approaching once more.