At a certain age, you don’t have to learn history, you’ve lived it. Here’s some of what we’ve lived. And a wish from both of us for peace and health in the New Year.
Fern: 1954 Oh, Pioneer!
I was a Polio Pioneer. My public school in the Bronx was picked to join the elementary schools around the country in this courageous experiment. Children, more than a million, in grades one to three participated. The schools were in Austin, Texas; in Chicago; in Eau Claire, Wis.; in Smith Grove, Ky; in Cedar Rapids, Iowa — public schools all across the country.
More than a million children! That's a million parents who signed release forms and gave permission for their children to participate in a blind medical trial. To this day, the Polio Pioneers make up the largest clinical trial in history. And the participants were beloved and precious children — six, seven and eight years of age — volunteered by their parents.
That's how very scared we were of polio.
I remember the day through the fog of memory and fear. My second-grade class was lined up in sized places to walk to the auditorium. There was a boys' line next to a girls' line and partners held hands. That's how we walked in line to the lunchroom and to assembly. There were always extra tall girls who held hands with each other. I was short, so in the front. My partner was a boy named David who had the unfortunate habit of wiping his nose on his shirt cuff. I took his hand warily.
The stage was set up with two long tables. Why our school chose to give us these vaccinations in the auditorium, in front of the entire second grade, I do not know. But it probably did cut down on the crying.
We sat, still as stones, until our names were called to ascend the stage. We rolled up our sleeves and offered an arm. Nurses, looking very professional in caps and white uniforms, administered the shots. There was the smell of alcohol. I don't recall the nurses smiling, but grown-ups were not such ready smilers in those days.
The boy before me whimpered when he got his shot. I remember bracing myself, determined not to make a sound.
At the end table, a woman in ordinary clothes — probably a class mother — had baskets of lollipops. I wanted a grape flavored one, but thinking it was "babyish" to ask, I took what I was given. Someone who was brave enough to be a Polio Pioneer was not someone who requested a specific flavor of lollipop.
In the fifties, many knew of a child who died of polio. Or a child confined to an iron lung. Or one who walked in clunky, metal braces.
As Polio Pioneers we were made to feel proud of our participation in this noble project. I don't recall my parents ever discussing it with me, but they must have trusted that scientific discovery could make a better world by eradicating this terrible disease.
In 1954, we got small cards certifying that we were genuine Polio Pioneers. I wish I still had mine. I would laminate it and carry it in my wallet, right next to my Medicare card.
Joe: 1964 When Camelot Died
When I heard the news, in the early afternoon of Friday, November 22, 1963, I was standing in the Student Union wearing a fake beard and green face paint. Below my Bermuda shorts, my legs from the knees down were green too. The get-up was for a good cause, an Ugly Man Contest, all part of a Fraternity fundraiser for the World Health Organization. Even so, I thought I couldn’t feel sillier.
Until I heard the news: The President had been shot.
A hush fell over the crowded room. The newscaster’s voice was faint, filtering down through ceiling speakers and everyone was hushed, straining to hear. Maybe it was only a flesh wound. We hoped as we waited for more information. The updates were vague…until they weren’t: Two priests, after administering the last rites, addressed the reporters waiting outside Parkland Hospital and confirmed that President Kennedy had died.
A significant moment in history and there I was, nineteen years old, wearing shorts and a torn sweatshirt with tufts of fake hair glued all over me. I walked straight to the men’s room and began scrubbing the paint off my face.
An international student—maybe from India—stood at the sink next to me, washing his hands. “Isn’t it awful?” I said to his image in the mirror, trying to seem nonchalant as I removed make-up in a men’s room.
“Whatever do you mean?” he asked, his accent distinct and quick-clipped (definitely from India). Oh, he hadn’t heard the news yet? So I told him. I’ll never forget how his face changed as I uttered the words, the sudden look of horror and shock. “You lie!” he shouted as he stepped back and away from me, his hands still dripping as he groped behind him for the door handle, “You lie! You lie!”
Fern: 1968 And So Too the Dream . . .
I was a college senior in upstate New York, taking a night class, The History of American Film. It was Thursday night, April 4th. (I had to look that date up.)
The movie we saw that evening was D.W. Griffith’s Civil War epic, Birth of a Nation, a silent movie from 1915 whose basic theme was that the newly freed slaves were savages (played by white actors in black-face) and only the heroic Ku Klux Klan could restore order.
A discussion would usually follow the movie, but not that night. I remember the professor walking to the front of the room and telling us that we were dismissed. And then: “Martin Luther King was shot tonight and died in Memphis, Tennessee.”
At first, I didn’t believe him. No one did. We thought it was a joke. A sick joke, perhaps whose purpose it was to show how easy it was to be influenced by propaganda.
We got up from our seats, puzzled. There were no cell phones to check if this information was true.
I walked with some of my classmates to the Student Union where there was a television. A crowd gathered, white college kids from suburban Long Island and upstate New York watched in shocked silence. Some of us cried.
It seemed like the end of something.
Fern: 1972 The First Iowa Caucus
On a blustery, cold night in January and almost eight months pregnant (in a winter coat that couldn’t be zipped closed), I walked with my neighbors to Crawford Elementary School in Ames, Iowa to participate in the very first Iowa Democratic presidential caucus. I thought it was thrilling.
We assembled in different classrooms on the first floor, sitting on tiny little seats in front of tiny little desks. The bulletin boards of the first grade room had cut out stencils of winter scenes. Paper snowflakes were taped to the windows.
The committee chair read us the Democratic platform. There were mandates for equal opportunity, free speech, human dignity. There were calls for closing tax loopholes, for women’s rights, for ending the war in Vietnam.
I joined the group that supported George McGovern for president. I was sure he was going to win against Richard Nixon. McGovern was decent and smart. Nixon – tricky Dick -- was sour and duplicitous.
I waddled the few blocks home in the freezing cold, inspired by democracy. I was proud of Iowa, my new home state. I was proud to be an American.
Joe: Somewhere in the 80’s
John Lennon was killed, the Challenger exploded, the Beirut barracks were truck-bombed, there were assassination attempts on both the President and the Pope. And let’s not forget the Iran-Contra Scandal. The 80’s were a mess, and for most of those years so was my personal life, yadda-yadda. But by the time the decade was over, I’d landed on my feet. Also, somewhere around then the Berlin Wall came down, and the Cold War ended. The Cold War ended? Hunh. I was so happy I don’t think I noticed.
Fern: 1991 The First Me Too
Anita Hill made history testifying before Congress when she accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment. He was a Supreme Court nominee and had also been her boss at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
The hearings were televised. I stayed up late every night watching it all, mesmerized.
I remember now a young woman who lived in the same facility as my severely handicapped son, Zachariah. She also could neither walk nor talk, but was of normal intelligence. I often saw her, propped up in her wheelchair watching television.
That autumn, she received a rudimentary language board and, with a pointer attached to a cap on her head, was able to communicate. Her very first full sentence, typed with slow precision was:
A-N-I-T-A H-I-L-L IS T-E-L-L-I-N-G T-H-E T-R-U-T-H.
2001 And It Was Such a Beautiful Day
8:30 A.M., we’re drinking coffee, doing the Tuesday crossword, and the phone rings. Our daughter, Katie, calling from New York, where she’s working at an art center. The first words out of her mouth, not even hello: “I’m okay!”
“Aw, Sweetie, of course you’re okay. . . ” She was alone in the big city. Her first real job after college.
“No,” she cut me off. “Dad, turn on the tv!”
And there were the two towers, by this time both of them ablaze. And then the first of countless replays of planes going into the buildings.
Katie’s office was on the upper East Side. She had no access to a television, and although she was only a mile or so away from the event itself, was calling us -- in Iowa -- for information.
We filled her in as best we could from what little real information the newscasters had so far. On the streets outside her office windows, life looked to be taking place normally enough, so we suggested she stay where she was for the meantime. Subways and streets in lower Manhattan were being closed down. Maybe later she could find a way to her apartment in Brooklyn.
We hung up, agreeing to call back shortly. When we did try, the phone began giving off busy signals before we’d finished dialing her number.
By mid-afternoon, we went for a drive. It was a beautiful cloudless day. Remember? For years afterward we referred to a “nine eleven” sky. We followed backroads to Saylorville Lake, stood on the dam there and watched birds of prey swoop down, pause then plummet into the water. Fishing. I saw a blue heron rise up from the reeds and take flight, with its long beak and outspread wings, like something from a million years ago.
Iowa Writers’ Collaborative Columnists
Laura Belin: Iowa Politics with Laura Belin, Windsor Heights
Doug Burns: The Iowa Mercury, Carroll
Dave Busiek: Dave Busiek on Media, Des Moines
Art Cullen: Art Cullen’s Notebook, Storm Lake
Suzanna de Baca Dispatches from the Heartland, Huxley
Debra Engle: A Whole New World, Madison County
Julie Gammack: Julie Gammack’s Iowa Potluck, Des Moines and Okoboji
Joe Geha: Fern and Joe, Ames
Jody Gifford: Benign Inspiration, West Des Moines
Nik Heftman, The Seven Times, Iowa and California
Beth Hoffman: In the Dirt, Lovilla
Dana James: New Black Iowa, Des Moines
Pat Kinney: View from Cedar Valley, Waterloo
Fern Kupfer: Fern and Joe, Ames
Robert Leonard: Deep Midwest: Politics and Culture, Bussey
Tar Macias: Hola Iowa, Iowa
Kurt Meyer, Showing Up, St. Ansgar
Kyle Munson, Kyle Munson’s Main Street, Des Moines
Jane Nguyen, The Asian Iowan, West Des Moines
John Naughton: My Life, in Color, Des Moines
Chuck Offenburger: Iowa Boy Chuck Offenburger, Jefferson and Des Moines
Barry Piatt: Piatt on Political Behind the Curtain, Washington, D.C.
Macy Spensley, The Creative Midwesterner, Davenport/Des Moines
Mary Swander: Mary Swander’s Buggy Land, Kalona
Mary Swander: Mary Swander’s Emerging Voices, Kalona
Cheryl Tevis: Unfinished Business, Boone County
Ed Tibbetts: Along the Mississippi, Davenport
Teresa Zilk: Talking Good, Des Moines
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Fern, I was also a Polio Pioneer. When you were in the big city of Cedar Rapids, I was among farm kids attending the Marion Rural Elementary School that later became Linn-Mar School District. We rode buses into town (Marion) and half of my class (4th grade?) received the vaccine while the other half received a placebo. I don’t remember being frightened; we were proud to do our duty for the country. Our parents (and yours) had fought in WWII and were intensely patriotic. Later the placebo group had to receive the real vaccine; I was fortunate to receive the real stuff the first time. I don’t think I’m old, but I appreciate your phrase about living through what is now considered history. Thank both of you for rekindling memories. I know I should document them for my grandchildren.
I, too, have lived through all these events. As important as it is to live through history, we also must read about history that preceded our lives. Many Americans think we can’t lose the freedoms we have enjoyed all of our lives, but we can. It’s happened before, and to people who also thought it could never happen to them.