I was born before most vaccines were invented. As my class of 30 or so navigated all twelve classes we missed a lot of school. On my fifth-grade report card the teacher wrote “Absent because of illness” across two consecutive six-week periods on my report card, And I was not the worst. The leader of our class did not join us until the third grade because she had been living in an iron lung at home since she was five or so. The infectious diseases would race through school. some times an entire class would be absent for a week or so. I have a picture of the friends who made it to my 8th birthday party. We looked like kids in warn-torn Germany. Skinny, weak, but grinning as we ate our cake. The diseases I remember that hit at least some of us; polio, two varieties of measles, pink eye, strep throat, chicken pox, mumps, whooping cough. My two younger brothers were born 7 and 12 years after me so they missed most of the Great Depression and most of the diseases. they are six-inches taller than me and at high school graduation they outweighed me by about 35 pounds.
Polio was the greatest fear, and I was in college when I went with my parents to get the vaccine at our City Park, Everybody went. We thought it was a miracle, a gift from God. But during the early years of my life there were plenty of people who voted against their interests in order to please their preacher.