Crowds take a look at the 1952 Missouri River flooding from the bluffs near Prospect Hill. By Journal accounts, that flood surpassed all previous records, including the historic flood of 1881. Sioux City Public Museum
It was the spring of 1952 in Sioux City, Iowa when the Floyd River and the Missouri River flooded. Sewers backed up, the slaughterhouses and stockyards flooded. My dad and grandfather built sandbag barriers next to our vaccine plant on the banks of the Floyd, but those barriers failed and the plant was inundated. Swift and Company, across the Floyd from our plant and the largest packing house in the Midwest, flooded, emptying blood and offal into the waters of the river. The sewage plants overflowed. Then came polio.
The summer of 1952 Sioux City, Iowa, was the epicenter of the last great polio epidemic, the one that happened before the vaccine. Normally our family spent summers in Colorado and that summer, once we left, we were told not to come back; people in Sioux City were told not to leave. Back in Sioux City, at The American Serum Company, the family business, Dad had stayed home and continued to work. Toward the end of summer my father, needing a break and missing his family, defied the order not to leave and drove out to Colorado to be with us. He made the then 700 mile, two lane blacktop trip in one day. Although only 36, Dad was overweight and this trip took a toll and may have set him up for what happened next. We spent a few days together in Green Mountain Falls and then we all drove back to Sioux City, though Dad again did the trip in one day by himself. It was almost September, time for school.
He was home when we got back and I remember him saying he was tired, that he had a headache. I remember looking up at him as we sat close in our living room and seeing the fatigue in his eyes. The headache got worse and daily he got sicker but neither he nor Mom knew what it was he had. The polio virus is an enterovirus, and in his case it presented like intestinal flu. The symptoms began with that headache and progressed to vomiting and diarrhea and then extraordinary pain. It was when he couldn’t stop vomiting and was throwing up blood that he went to the hospital. It took more than a week to reach this point. After he left, my brother and I never saw him again—children weren’t allowed in the polio wards. The family was quarantined and officials posted a big red sign on the front of the house. My brother and I would wave to friends as they drove past. To boost our immune systems and hopefully prevent us from becoming sick, my mom, my brother, and I received gamma globulin shots. Those shots probably saved us from the disease.
Dad was put in an iron lung. He was diagnosed with bulbar polio, the most severe form of paralytic polio. It attacks neurons in the brain stem, and though he needed the lung to breath, he could still talk. In addition Mom told us other parts of his body were paralyzed. Had he lived, he would never have been out of the iron lung but, alas, he did not live and by the end of October he was gone. Polio, like the coronavirus, could present as asymptomatic and like coronavirus is extremely contagious, even as asymptomatic, though unlike coronavirus it is mainly carried in fluids from the digestive track and feces. Contaminated water was surely a large component of the contagion in Sioux City, but poor hygiene could also pass the virus on. It was said that one in four people in Sioux City that summer had symptomatic polio. We didn’t know how many were asymptomatic. My family surmised Dad contracted the disease while playing golf with an asymptomatic friend who later became sick; the timeline of his illness supports that. However, Dad could have been exposed in other ways. He had worked cleaning the plant after it was flooded with sewage-laden waters, for instance. Who knows what he had touched, who knows whose hands were dirty.
We fled Sioux City after Dad died. We drove down the Missouri River Valley with the windows of the car tightly rolled up because Mom was afraid of the plague associated with the river. Our lives had been upended in a matter of months and it is no wonder she wanted to barricade us all from the unseen foe that had taken my father.
We all know how the polio story ended. Early in 1954 the Salk killed-virus vaccine was administered widely to school children and yearly the incidence of polio dropped until it is negligible now. Interestingly (or not) the vaccine we manufactured in Sioux City, initially a killed-virus version, then an attenuated-virus version was significant in eliminating hog cholera. A weird parallel for me.
My thoughts on the present circumstance are the following— when a disease is this stealthy and at the same time is so easily transmitted, you do not know precisely where you can become infected. When people say to wash your hands and clean surfaces, do it. When people tell you to socially isolate, do it. If they tell you not to travel, pay attention. Do not assume anyone is without disease and never assume it can’t happen to you.
