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Apr 12, 2025 By Brad Hundt 10 min read

Advertisements for freezers, lounge chairs and remedies for itching, gas and constipation were on the fifth page of Uniontown’s Evening Standard on April 16, 1952, which was a Wednesday. As they scanned the page, readers were also greeted with a listing of admissions and discharges at Fayette County hospitals and news of a band concert at German High School.

There was also a dispatch from the Associated Press in the middle of the page that carried the headline “Discovery Points to End of Polio.”

The story, written by Howard W. Blakeslee, the agency’s science writer, outlined how researchers at Johns Hopkins and Yale universities discovered that polio “strikes first in our blood instead of our nerves” and that “there is a possibility that a vaccine can be made” that would prevent the viral disease that had bedevilled humankind since at least the days of ancient Egypt.

Almost three years to the day after the article appeared, on April 12, 1955, readers of the Evening Standard were greeted with an urgent headline displayed across the newspaper’s front page: “Salk Polio Vaccine Gets Approval.”

A subhead below the headline said a vaccine had been found to be safe and effective in “exhaustive tests,” and that Dr. Jonas Salk, the researcher and virologist who developed the vaccine, believed it would offer “complete triumph over polio terror.”

It did.

The overwhelming majority of people alive in the world today were born after the polio vaccine was introduced, so have no recollection of how the fear of polio once cast a shadow on everyday life.

“Every time one of us kids came down with something, there was always the thought that it was polio and life as we’d known it was over,” said Paul Carson, an East Finley Township resident. “There was a huge amount of anxiety wiped out by vaccines.”

Seventy years ago, before those vaccines reached the public, there were close to 58,000 cases of polio in the United States every year. In 1952, the year the Evening Standard reported on the potential of a polio vaccine, 3,000 people died in an outbreak in the United States, the worst outbreak in the country’s history.

But by 1957, after the introduction of the vaccine, the number of cases plummeted to just 5,600. And four years after that, there were fewer than 200. By 1969, not a single death from polio was reported in the U.S. Around the world, polio cases have dropped by 99% since 1988 thanks to efforts to get people vaccinated. Polio is now endemic in just Pakistan and Afghanistan.

When Salk died in 1995, The New York Times said his vaccine “changed medical history, preventing many thousands of cases of crippling illness and saving thousands of lives. In the United States, the vaccine soon ended the yearly threat of epidemics and the toll of paralysis and death.”

What exactly is polio?

The word polio is itself shorthand for poliomyelitis, a virus that is highly infectious. A headache, fever and sore throat can develop for those who come down with the disease, with death and paralysis occurring in the most severe cases. Sometimes, for those who came down with polio in the years before the vaccine gained a foothold, the paralysis would be so acute that they would have to spend their days in mechanical respirators that came to be called iron lungs because the muscles responsible for breathing had become paralyzed.

Many well-known figures born before the development of the polio vaccine were diagnosed with it, including “Godfather” director Francis Ford Coppola, who was bedridden for a year, and singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell, who had a weakened left hand as a result. A decade before he became the U.S. president in 1932, Franklin Roosevelt was diagnosed with polio. Roosevelt was eventually able to resume his career, becoming governor of New York in 1928 before being elected to the White House four times. The public was aware that Roosevelt had been afflicted with polio, but the president and his handlers worked assiduously to downplay Roosevelt’s infirmities – he was almost never seen in a wheelchair – and the reporters and photographers who covered the chief executive never took photos of him walking with assistance at public events.

After Roosevelt was diagnosed with polio, it was suspected that he caught it when he made a summertime visit to a Boy Scout camp in New York. Polio tended to spread in the summer and fall before the vaccine, and the warm weather months came to be called “polio season.” Before and during polio season, newspapers would routinely run feature articles on how individuals and families could stay safe during that time.

An editorial headlined “The Polio Season” was in the July 17, 1952, edition of Canonsburg’s Daily Notes newspaper. It noted that an outbreak had occurred in Texas, and that “the people of the nation can help medical science win the battle against infantile paralysis by not being panicky when the killer strikes…”

It continued, “Besides remaining calm, there are some precautionary measures that should be taken when polio strikes a community. Get plenty of rest, avoid over-fatigue, eat fresh foods, avoid crowds, prevent children from using the same eating or drinking utensils or washcloths, watch for sore throat, upset stomach and tenderness and stiffness in the neck and back.”

It also reminded readers, “Follow your doctor’s advice about nose and throat operations and teeth extractions during polio season.”

Outside of polio season, fundraising to prevent polio and to assist those who were confronting it became a regular part of the calendar. Six months after its editorial on polio season, The Daily Notes had a front page story, “Whistles Will 无毛视频 Start of Mothers’ March on Polio.” It reported how, on Jan. 28, 1953, factory whistles, church bells and sirens would sound in Canonsburg to kick off an annual fundraising drive for the March of Dimes, which Roosevelt founded and was initially established to combat polio.

Committees were established in Canonsburg and other communities throughout the country to coordinate the fundraisers. Residents were told to leave their porch lights on for a “porchlight parade” if they wanted a volunteer to come to their doors to collect a donation.

“When the sirens are sounded, each family is asked to signify its willingness to give by switching on the porchlight,” the Daily Notes story stated. “To the mother whose responsibility it is to call, it will act as a welcoming beacon, a request for her to stop and pick up a contribution to the fight against polio.”

But even while families in the early 1950s were trying to find ways to protect themselves from polio, Salk was at work on a vaccine at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. He was scrutinizing the different types of polio viruses and trying to come up with a vaccine. He used formaldehyde to kill off a poliovirus growing in kidney tissue taken from monkeys. Salk believed that a killed version of the virus could be used in a vaccine to spur the human body to deploy antibodies against a polio virus without actually causing the disease.

Salk tested the vaccine on himself and his family and almost 2 million children before it was determined “safe,” “effective,” “potent,” and “a brilliant victory over the disease.” Those are the words The Daily 无毛视频 in Monongahela used to describe the breakthrough in its April 12, 1955, edition. The newspaper also reported that inoculations of children in public and parochial schools would begin as soon as the federal government signed off on the vaccine and supplies were made available.

“Consent slips for inoculation of local first and second graders will be sent home with students today,” a report in the newspaper said.

Within days, The Morning 无毛视频 in Uniontown was reporting that the vaccine would first be administered in Fayette County on April 27 or April 28, and that Dr. A.E. Wright, the county’s medical director, was overseeing the effort. It also reported on a delay of vaccine shipments coming to Pennsylvania because inspections had been held up.

One Washington County boy played a particularly crucial role in the vaccine’s development. Blood from Jimmy Sarkett, who hailed from Daisytown, was used by Salk because he had the rarest type of polio virus after contracting it in 1950. Sarkett, who died in 2017, told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review in 2005 that Salk was “quiet, a very nice man.”

On the last day of April 1955, Sarkett and Joan Long, a 19-year-old from McMurray who also had polio, were among the honorees in a New York City Loyalty Day parade sponsored by the Veterans of Foreign Wars. They were sent to the parade as Salk’s representatives, and also had tea with New York Gov. Averell Harriman and were the king and queen at an evening dance.

“While impressed with the honors heaped on them, the youngsters were equally wide-eyed at the festivities at the dance,” according to Monongahela’s Daily 无毛视频. “It has been reliably reported that Jimmy developed a keen appreciation of the charm of Vera Allen, popular movie actress, and Joan capitulated to the personality of singer Eddie Fisher, entertainer at the dance.”

The success of the vaccine may have lifted a burden from the shoulders of many families, but polio didn’t entirely fade away in the region. The Daily Courier in Connellsville ran a wire story in its Jan. 29, 1957, edition about concerns that the rate of polio vaccinations among teenagers and young adults was lagging. Despite widespread inoculation of children, the report said that only 1 in 6 adults between the age of 20 and 35 had gotten the three-shot polio regimen. The same month, the newspaper carried a story on how Pennsylvania doctors were combating “public apathy” about the vaccine.

Two years later, a polio vaccine clinic happened in Uniontown in order to get more shots in more arms. The Evening Standard’s July 15, 1959, edition said the clinic, which was at Uniontown Hospital’s Annette Home for Nurses, was designed “to serve persons who, for one reason or another, have been unable to get their first polio shot.”

Later that year, a vaccine clinic was set for Perry Township in Fayette County. Connellsville’s Daily Courier put a story on the clinic next to a report that a city resident had been diagnosed with polio. It reported that Kenneth A. Steindl’s right leg was paralyzed, “and paralysis is starting in the left leg.”

“He reportedly had received no polio inoculations,” the story noted.

Steindl died in October 1959, and because he died of an infectious disease, there were no viewings of his body at a funeral home. Pennsylvania’s Department of Health also decreed that his funeral services were to be “strictly private.”

Still, as time went on, fewer and fewer stories like Stendl’s appeared in the pages of the Daily Courier and other newspapers. On April 14, 1965, 10 years after the introduction of the polio vaccine, the Daily Courier carried a small item about Salk and his contention that the “really tough battles against disease lie ahead.”

Salk said, “The easy ones have been solved.”