One August day I was outside in front of our home playing hopscotch with some of the other girls in the neighborhood, when I realized I did not feel well. A few days later, my right arm was paralyzed.

She remembers the day she felt too tired to feed those chickens, and was too tired to hold her 9-month-old niece. Finally, the family doctor was called and her parents were told she had the “the flu or grippe”

Ina Pinkney was infected in 1944, during World War II, more than a decade before the Salk Vaccine became available, stemming the annual summer epidemics that paralyzed communities almost like it paralyzed children.