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.

As polio survivors we understand. Spinal taps, visits only through a window and no touch between a child an their parent.

“Parents of children today don’t have any idea of the fear that took ovr the country in the summers of the 1940’s and 50’s.” Joe Randig for the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

A fear of the unknown. The need to maintain an appropriate distance. An urgent desire to find a cure or vaccine. They're the hallmarks of the coronavirus pandemic, but they also characterized an earlier epidemic: when paralysis-causing polio ravaged the U.S. in the 1940s and '50s.

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.