Warm Springs Read online

  All week I’d think of the conversation I’d have with my parents the following Sunday after church, collecting imagined victories, social engagements, popularity, good behavior, although I had not told them I was going to Mass every Sunday or how little I missed the long silence of Quaker Meeting, only that noon was the best time for them to call.

  I had it in mind to draw the picture of a busy twelve-year-old girl living an ordinary life in a hospital at which children got better and better and never died. I would tell them of crushes and best friends and compliments from doctors on my progress and athleticism, from nurses on my good citizenship and work on behalf of others. I was, in short, deliriously happy at Warm Springs, as they desperately hoped I would be, and grateful for the opportunity to get better for free, costing my parents almost nothing, as a result of President Roosevelt’s March of Dimes, money collected in a highly successful campaign held every year on the anniversary of the president’s birth, which supported, among other things, the treatment of children at Warm Springs.

  Stopped in my wheelchair in a corner of the courtyard, thinking of the dead baby, some dead baby passing sinless into heaven, substantial or insubstantial—I just didn’t think it was possible or desirable, and the thought of it, dying and going to heaven, was unacceptable. I wanted to call my mother, my darling mother, and tell her, “A baby died today in the Babies’ Ward,” and hear her soft, magical voice pressed to the receiver, saying my name. “Susan.” But of course I would never tell my parents that a baby had died. It would frighten them, so far away from me, so vulnerable to my fate.

  My plan for the day, after Joey Buckley got his wheelchair, was to go with him to the candy shop, where we got to go sometimes twice a week, always on Fridays, and this was a Friday. We’d get cheese crunchies and Grapette and sit in the sun behind the buildings, where no one would expect to see two patients sunning. I’d buy him bubblegum with baseball cards as a present for getting over surgery and we’d talk. I was an excellent listener.

  And when we’d finished our snacks and I had hold of little pieces of Joey Buckley’s life, we’d race our wheelchairs down the steep paved hill where on Saturday afternoons the stretchers and wheelchairs wound their way down the path between the buildings from the courtyard to the movie theater.

  I wheeled across the courtyard to the top of the paved hill and looked down. I was good with a wheelchair. I could push the chair up to a high speed, take hold of the right wheel with a strong grip, and make a 180-degree spin so that my body, like a keeling racing sailboat, was nearly parallel to the sidewalk. I could wheel up that hill without stopping, without slipping backward, my hands like little vises on the wheels, the bone showing through the skin. I wanted to move as fast as the chair would go—crouch my body down low so my head was just over my knees stretched out in front of me. I stopped at the top of the hill on level ground just before the bend, but if I were to move inches into the downgrade, the chair would be off on its wild ride to the bottom of the hill and I’d be holding on for dear life. That’s how I saw myself, and imagining the speed, imagining Joey Buckley flying beside me, our hands on the wheels, ready to stop on a dime, I decided we’d do just that—we’d race down the hill this morning, early, before too many people were sitting around the courtyard on such a fine day. First, before doing anything else, we’d race to the bottom and secure our friendship like surviving warriors. We’d make it to the bottom and fall into each other’s arms.

  I had arrived at Warm Springs in the late summer of 1950, on the same day that Joey Buckley arrived in his leather and aluminum chair, both legs crippled, in long leg braces, a motherless boy from a small town in Alabama. I was alert to his presence, greeting every new face as a possibility, and I liked the way he looked with his square face and wide-set brown eyes. In the waiting room as we checked into the hospital, his father sat next to my mother and I remember the image of him exactly: olive skin, broad face, and long shiny hair, his head held in his big hands as if it had cut loose from his body.

  “Joey would have been an athlete. He would have been a great athlete, this boy,” his father told my parents. “He would’ve played football at Alabama, and now what?”

  “Now I’m going to be fixed, Papa,” Joey said. “You too?” he asked me.

  It was still early morning, breakfast trays collected in the wards, meds distributed, plans in place for the rest of the day. Joey and I were parked at the top of the steep hill, looking down.

  “It’s a long way to the bottom,” he said.

  I was checking Joey’s casts, sticking out in front of him propped on pillows, blood seeping through the plaster at the top of both of the casts.

  “The blood’s from my stabilization incision,” he said, conscious that I was looking at it. “You bled too, right?”

  “Right,” I said, a shadow of doubt, a cloud floating across my sun. “But I had only one stabilization and you had two, so that’s a lot of blood.”

  “It’ll dry up,” he said. “So why are we doing this?”

  “For fun,” I said. “Just for fun, don’t you think?”

  “Yes, for fun,” he said. He was smiling and his eyes lit up and I knew we were ready to push off.

  “Hand in hand?” I called to him.

  “I can’t push if we’re holding hands,” he said.

  And lined up side by side, we gave a huge push on the metal ring on the wheels of our chairs and we were off down the hill, faster and faster, and I think I was squealing with excitement and so was Joey and maybe he called out “How do we stop?” but maybe he didn’t. We were going so fast, so much faster than I even imagined in my dreams of this adventure, I felt that I was losing control, the bottom of the hill rising to meet us as we sailed down side by side, and I grabbed the right wheel to stop the momentum, grabbed it with all my might so the chair would turn 180 degrees and stop there at the bottom. And as I did, sensing that the chair would stop, that I had taken control in the nick of time, I saw Joey fly into the air just ahead, out of his wheelchair, the chair tipped on its side and Joey gliding above me, his arms flailing, his heavy white casts pulling him down, down, down to the cement walk and then the heavy thud of the casts hitting the ground or the thud of his head and silence.

  A Brief History of Warm Springs Polio Hospital

  October 1924–August 1950

  WARM SPRINGS was a village, is still a village, of fewer than a thousand permanent residents, located eighty miles southwest of Atlanta. It was a stop on the Columbus, Georgia, milk train in the twenties, approached then by a narrow, bumpy dirt road. At the turn of the century it had been a popular spa resort where vacationers came to escape the sultry southern summers and the rising industrial pollution in the cities, to take the warm mineral waters at the pool of the Meriwether Inn. But by 1924, when Franklin Roosevelt arrived at the Warm Springs railway station with Eleanor Roosevelt and his secretary, Missy Le Hand, the Meriwether Inn, co-owned by a friend of Roosevelt’s, was a rundown shamble of Victorian gingerbread architecture, and the simple cottages around the inn—in one of which Roosevelt set up housekeeping on the first of his many visits—had neither electricity nor plumbing.

  Roosevelt had come for the mineral waters.

  In late summer of 1921, as outbreaks of poliomyelitis escalated to epidemic proportions in the United States, Roosevelt, on holiday with his family on Campobello Island, off the coast of northern Maine, came down with the paralytic strain of the polio virus and was gradually paralyzed below the neck.

  He was thirty-nine years old, with a promising political career, a professional marriage, and five young children—and he’d been having a long-running love affair with Lucy Mercer, Eleanor’s personal secretary. At the time of his illness, he had served four years in the New York State Senate as a Democrat in a Republican district, had been appointed by Woodrow Wilson as assistant secretary of the navy in 1914, and in 1920 had been nominated as his party’s vice presidential candidate, to run in an unsuccessful campaign with James
Cox.

  In newspaper accounts from those years, he is described as a skillful speaker, with the jovial charm and easy confidence of his protected class, but neither reflective nor intellectual, and not particularly serious. As one reporter summarized it, Franklin Roosevelt was an affable, decent, moral man, a leader by nature, but finally a lightweight unacquainted with grief.

  His initial reaction to his illness was stoic denial. He maintained absolute confidence that he would walk again, even when he had been told he would not. Eleanor Roosevelt said, “There were certain things he never talked about—he would just shut up.” “Certain things” included death and disability. He never, according to Eleanor, said he could not walk, insisting on good cheer without complaints even during the most painful months following the onset of polio. This brave invention lasted throughout his life and political career, in which his crippled condition was concealed by the construct of a “splendid deception”—his wheelchair seldom visible in photographs, and his habit of holding on to someone’s arm instead of using crutches when he stood. But he couldn’t walk, and when he stood, he was supported by braces from his ankles to the top of his thighs, locked at the knees so he wouldn’t topple. As recently as the late 1990s, there was an ongoing debate, reflecting his own insistence on appearances, on whether or not to have the FDR memorial in Washington, D.C., include his wheelchair. Things were finally resolved in favor of the wheelchair.

  Polio has had many names, among them infantile paralysis, since young children, with immune systems not yet fully developed, were the most frequent victims. Poliomyelitis is the scientific term, from the Greek polios, meaning gray, and myelos, meaning core—so named because the scarred area of the body in a case of polio was the cable of gray matter running down the center of the spinal column. By the twentieth century, when outbreaks of polio became epidemic in Europe and North America, the disease had been around for many centuries, recorded in images of crippled children with characteristic bone-thin legs and dropped feet, and found even in Egyptian mummies. But as a widespread public health issue, the prevalence of the disease increased with sanitation efforts following industrialization. Most commonly affected were the unprotected privileged, who were so seldom exposed to crowded conditions that their immune systems were undefended against the virus.

  I grew up believing, as most people did, that polio was a disease of the poor, who played in public places and lived in overcrowded conditions. It was well known that the virus was passed through feces, and some of the shame associated with the illness had to do with class.

  But it was a false premise. The disease itself, and then the shame of the disease, present in every culture and epidemic in the puritanical upper classes, suggested moral laxity and a failure of will. Will, in this case associated with an idea of perfection, ought to protect a person from illness. A failure of the body reflected a weakness of character, or so it was seen.

  By the middle of the twentieth century, three separate polio viruses had been identified by scientists. The most common of these has the symptoms of influenza, with high fever and muscle aches, and disappears after a couple of weeks with no residual damage. Many people, including children, had this strain without ever knowing they’d contracted anything more serious than the flu. The least frequent and most damaging of the viruses is that of bulbar polio, which attacks the medulla oblongata, the part of the brain that controls autonomic functions such as breathing and relays signals between the brain and the spinal cord. We are most familiar with this crippling strain of the virus, which affects the limbs—usually, as in the case of Roosevelt, the legs.

  During the active life of the virus, the limbs are so painful that a patient cannot bear to be touched, even by sheets.

  Roosevelt was left crippled from the waist down. For the next seven years he refused to accept permanent paralysis, dedicating himself full time to his own rehabilitation, living at his mother’s house in Hyde Park, sometimes in Florida, eventually in Warm Springs, following a spartan regime of exercises, determined to recover the use of his gradually atrophying legs.

  Eleanor Roosevelt and FDR’s political adviser Louis Howe, who moved into the Roosevelt home and remained there throughout the president’s life, continued Roosevelt’s political career from New York without him, concealing the severity of his handicap from the public in an atmosphere, still lingering, in which physical disability was an indication of a weakness of character.

  In October 1924, when Roosevelt arrived in the farm community of Warm Springs, located on high ground in the Pine Mountains of Georgia, he set up housekeeping in one of the primitive cottages. Eleanor stayed briefly, uncomfortable in a rural setting in which chickens were bought live and killed for dinner, and disturbed by the treatment of blacks and the general narrow thinking of white southerners. But Franklin Roosevelt had found a new home.

  He had come on the advice of his friend George Carter Peabody, the co-owner of the Meriwether Inn with a man named Tom Loyless. Peabody had told Roosevelt of the success of a young polio—we were referred to as “polios”—who had gradually learned to walk again after swimming in the mineral waters of Warm Springs.

  Roosevelt planned to walk again. Long after he was told by orthopedic doctors that his legs were damaged beyond repair, even after he realized that fact himself, he still believed it could be possible for him to change the prognosis.

  When I was at Warm Springs we had a “fight song”—probably there had always been fight songs. Certainly the spirit of them, if not the songs themselves, originated with Roosevelt. Our fifties song was sung to “Music! Music! Music!” (“Put another nickel in/In the nickelodeon”), and it went like this:

  Put another muscle in

  Where the quadriceps have been

  ’Cause we know we’ll never win

  With traces, traces, traces.

  What’s the use of stretch and strain

  What’s the good of pull and pain

  When our muscle tests remain

  Just traces, traces, traces.

  They push our torso

  And make it more so

  When we try to make a muscle go

  It’s substitution, no, no, no.

  So even though our hopes have soared

  Higher than our muscles scored

  Just the same we thank the Lord

  For traces, traces, traces.

  Roosevelt had traces in his withering legs—whispers of muscle response, promising, maybe only teasing, that hard work and determination and constancy might resurrect the life in muscle. He had reason for optimism.

  On Roosevelt’s first morning at Warm Springs, he met Louis Joseph, the young man who had learned to walk after swimming in the warm mineral waters. Together they devised a regime of exercises for Roosevelt, which he would follow and teach to other polios over the next twenty-one years of his life as a visitor or resident of Warm Springs.

  The highly mineralized springs rise from the Pine Mountains and flow at the rate of 1,800 gallons a minute, remaining at a temperature of 88 degrees. The waters, as it turned out, were not specifically curative for any of us who bathed in them, but they had a remarkable buoyancy, which countered the pull of gravity and gave the handicapped bathers a sense of moving with an ease impossible on dry land.

  For the first time, Roosevelt was actually able to walk on his own in the water without falling. But of course walking was an illusion, a result of the buoyant water and not of traces that could be coached to life.

  Shortly after Roosevelt’s arrival in Warm Springs, the Atlanta Journal sent a reporter to write a story about his visit, which appeared in late October in the Journal’s Sunday magazine under the title “Franklin D. Roosevelt Will Swim to Health.” The article was reprinted across the country and read by many polios. Roosevelt had already spent hours with Tom Loyless talking about revitalizing the Meriwether Inn and developing a convalescent rehabilitation center for the victims of infantile paralysis, who would live among the able-bodied guests
of the old inn.

  After the Atlanta Journal article appeared, letters began to pour in from polios all over the country, and some polios were desperate enough to arrive at Warm Springs without invitation or notice. The response astonished Loyless and Roosevelt. The inn, still hoping to attract its usual visitors, was not designed for wheelchairs. There were many steps and narrow doorways; the cottages had no bathrooms. There was no therapeutic equipment, and no research studies had been conducted, as would be required today. No medical clearance was given, no standards were set, no physicians were in attendance.

  One day, so the story is told, Roosevelt and Tom Loyless and some neighbors were sitting on the porch of the inn when a messenger came up the hill to say that two people had arrived by train who couldn’t walk, and what should be done with them? The decision was made to put them up in the village and to fix up one of the wrecks of a cottage for them. By the time that cottage was put in order for the two new arrivals, eight more had come. That was the fall of 1924. By the following summer, there were more than twenty-five patients.

  That summer of 1925, with Loyless too ill with cancer to work, Roosevelt took over the operation of what would become the Georgia Warm Springs Polio Foundation. He had ramps built into the inn, cottages repaired, and he personally designed a water table, which sits a foot beneath the surface of the water and is still used for hydrotherapy. He devised exercises and treatment programs, drew up muscle charts, worked with the patients on their exercises.