It was the summer of 1952 and our country was in the middle of its worst polio epidemic since 1916. Nearly 58,000 cases of polio were reported and more than 3,000 died. I was lucky.

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.

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.

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.

One day I was an active 12-year-old riding my bike, playing baseball with my friends and climbing trees on my grandmother’s farm. The next day, I remember feeling bad, missing school and developing a limp.

I probably didn’t give much thought to my plain brown shoes in the beginning. I was just happy to be on my feet and walking.

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.

I woke up one morning in 1953 with a very painful, stiff neck and back. I was thirteen years old, and I’d never known anything like this.

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.

Recently I had the opportunity to return to the hospital where I received twenty-two months of rehabilitation following polio in 1952. At that time it was known as the D.T. Watson Home for Crippled Children.

It was a very hot day. When they passed Logan Circle she let him play in the water fountain. That’s the day they believe he caught polio. The next day, they blocked off the entire area.

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 came down with a high fever and a stiff neck. Mom called our doctor. The next thing I knew, I was alone in an ambulance bound for a hospital at the other end of the county.

Let me tell you how Santa and I came together 63 years ago.

As an active 10 year old, living in a tight knit community in East Detroit, Roger enjoyed the summer of 1947 playing with his friends in the neighborhood. Soon the summer fun came to a harsh end with the spread of polio.