I mean, who haven't we seen with a sleeve rolled up and a mask on being jabbed with a needle? You have to be at least a septuagenarian like myself to remember the polio vaccinations in the '50s. Different disease, but just as scary. Kids were being placed in iron lungs, legs developed deformities. There was a fear of being in crowds, or pools.
No need to recount the Salk vaccine that became available and was used to inoculate children everywhere. Our local elementary school is named after Jonas Salk. What I didn't remember as a kid was that the vaccine had a rocky start due to tainted product coming out of one lab. Instead of immunizing kids, the vaccine was giving kids the polio. There were deaths and a recall. But the bad batches were quickly identified, and the mass vaccinations continued.
I have a vivid memory of all the kids in my school being lined up in the gym and given the shot. At P.S. 22 in Flushing there were several lines that lead to a nurse and maybe a doctor who administered the shot. And one of those nurses improbably was my mother.
She was a nurse in the Army. And before that she was a nurse at St. Charles hospital in Aurora, Illinois where she went to nursing school. I don't know the year she entered the service, but women weren't drafted. She was born in 1918, so she was at least in her 20s when she became a 2nd Lieutenant.
She never served overseas, but was assigned to Thayer General Hospital in Nashville, where she met my father, a Tech-Sergeant, who for some reason was shipped back from Guam because of some injury suffered in a typhoon.
He was in the Corps of Engineers and made maps from reconnaissance photos. How you get shipped literally halfway around the world is something only the Army could explain. While in the hospital my father told me they removed his pilonidal cyst, a vestigial part of the lower spine, the tailbone, that was done by the Army surgeons pretty much as surgical target practice.
No one these days gets their pilonidial cyst removed. When I mentioned my father's experience to Bobby G., one of the Assembled who is a retired surgeon who did two years at Fort Monmouth in service to his country in the Vietnam Era, and arranged all the poker games he could with the junior officers, he told me that a pilonidial cyst was called "jeep rider's disease."
From the above photo, you can understand how riding in an Army jeep might be aggravating to your tailbone. "Doctor, what do you recommend?" "We should operate if we're not busy. We need the practice."
So, despite the no-fraternization rules that were supposed to be in effect between women officers and enlisted men, my parents were married before the war ended.
I go through this rather long story because after the war ended and my mother was discharged, she never worked outside the home. Prior to being in the Army she was a licensed R.N. in Illinois, but nowhere else but the Army.
Along comes 1954, 1955 and the polio epidemic and mass vaccinations, and my guess is they need volunteers to help administer the shot. How my mother applied or was selected was something I never knew. But think about this. People were needed They said they had a certain background and they were allowed to proceed. There was no New York license. There was no background check. She hadn't been a nurse for probably 10 years, but there she was giving injections.
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