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.

These Philadelphia-area polio survivors continue to suffer from a disease thought to be long gone.

Barry McMahon, a 72-year-old retired film and video producer, received a diagnosis of acute paralytic polio in 1951 when he was 3 years old.

Have you ever wondered? And really closed your eyes, If only for a moment, And thought of special times.

I contracted polio in Amarillo, Texas in October 1952, when I was 3 1/2 years old. No one in my family knows where I might have contracted the virus.

On a hot January afternoon in 1946, the country doctor hurried from attending a polio case at a home in Cooma to the local hospital to deliver me.

I had just returned from a week’s vacation at Geneva on the Lake. I was almost eighteen years old and was embarking on a nursing career. While at home, I was preparing to start an “on the floor” study the on the following Monday. Three days prior, I started having a weird sensation on my skin.

One morning, shortly before my ninth birthday, I had trouble getting my shoes on, but eventually I did and went off to school with this thought from my mother - “If you have any trouble during school, go to the office”.

Rome, 1950. I was twenty-two and had been traveling through Europe for six weeks with Carol, my college roommate. We had another month remaining before returning to the United States.

When I was seven months old, my Mother and Daddy noticed my runny nose and how much I was falling when I was trying to hold onto furniture and pull myself up. By the time the tests were completed, I couldn’t stand at all.

John Nanni, as most people who contract polio do, got it as a baby, just one year before the vaccine became widely available.

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.

Josephine (Briggs) Gross was born in Deadwood, South Dakota…. She was diagnosed with Polio at the age of 4, and remembers very little of it, however does not feel as though she suffered with it very badly while she was sick.

In order to get away from Trenton, NJ, which was experiencing a terrible epidemic of polio, Sally’s cousins had rented a house while their husbands were overseas. However, she and two of her younger cousins got sick, and Sally had to be driven home.

I have gone cross country from Seattle, WA to Lancaster, PA and up and down both coasts. Because I live on the west coast, my favorite option for east coast rail travel is to fly to Chicago and catch the train there.