My Mother Couldn’t Choose Whether to Vaccinate Me for Polio
Dr. Salk’s Great Breakthrough Came 224 Days After I Fell Ill. So All We Could Do Was Head for the Isolation Ward.
It had been a good year for Lois Mace.
She and her husband, only three years beyond college, had bought their first house. A solid redbrick and clapboard Cape Cod, it sat on a leafy street named for a character out of a Longfellow poem. In its driveway glistened a new sedan, silver-gray with a burgundy roof and whitewalls, a gift from her father, a Ford dealer.
And under its dormers that last day of August 1954 slept her three children: A sunny toddler with platinum blonde hair and a weak stomach …
