What polio in post-WWII America can teach us about living in a pandemic
By ALISSA GREENBERG, July 29, 2020 for NOVA
My grandmother’s 1946 ‘polio summer’ featured quarantines, canceled events, and remote learning. Her story is a reminder that we’ve been here before.
“Dear Miss Zurovsky,” the editor of The Patchogue Advance, a small Long Island newspaper, began. “Thank you for your letter of September 16th making application for a position as a reporter on this newspaper. I regret to advise you that this job decidedly calls for a man.”
The year was 1946, and my grandmother had graduated from journalism school at the University of Minnesota a few months earlier. But finding a job as a woman presented unexpected obstacles—obstacles that made her angry enough that she kept those letters and, many decades later, passed them on to me.
When I declared my intention to become a journalist in my late teens, she talked to me about her frustrations and read me her rejection letters. And when I entered the workforce, she told me how glad she was that I could finish what she started. In my first months of work at NOVA, I’ve thought of her often. She died two years ago but would have been thrilled (and, I hope, proud) to hear of my joining the staff of a show she loved to watch.