When Salvation Rode the Rails
The prayers of the world had not yet been answered. There was no vaccine, and no word of one on the horizon. The 22-month-old daughter of Robert and Shirley Palmer had already come down with polio and had survived it, and now Mrs. Palmer, 27, had contracted the disease, too. She struggled to breathe on her own. As she fought the disease, her weight fell to 80 pounds.
It was the fear-filled spring of 1949, when a polio epidemic was breaking the hearts of families around the globe. Numbers alone can't tell the story of the paralyzing disease's devastation, so let us consider for a moment one family, on the day that Mr. and Mrs. Palmer boarded a Union Pacific streamliner in Los Angeles headed for Ithaca, N.Y., near her parents' house. Robert Palmer, a P-51 fighter pilot during World War II, had been taking college classes in California. Now, in Ithaca, a bed and an iron lung awaited Mrs. Palmer at a polio-care facility, the Reconstruction Home.
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