Louise Rose, Portsmouth, Virginia, 1957

Since my mother passed away on January 16th, I have spent more time with the scrapbook she left behind that documents her work in the fight against polio in the mid-1950s. It is a remarkable collection of articles and letters that pieced together provides a narrative of events leading to what appears to be the first polio mass vaccination clinics in the United States.

One of the letters is an invitation for my mother to attend a March of Dimes meeting at its headquarters in New York to give a presentation of the program she organized in Virginia. She was 28 years old and we lived in a tiny house in a working-class section of Portsmouth near the navy shipyard. She probably made the trip alone with me and my father staying at home.

Another of the letters comes from Basil O’Connor who had been one of Franklin Roosevelt’s top advisers and the founder of the March of Dimes. He also served several years as the head of the Red Cross. O’Connor was aware of my mother’s extraordinary vaccination initiative and her fundraising prowess.

He wrote:

“Please extend my warmest thanks to each and every member of the corps of volunteers who worked so determinedly with you in the 1957 March of Dimes. I wish it were possible to express these sentiments directly and individually, because only in that way could I feel them to be completely adequate. Surely the effort that went into the campaign just past completely overshadows anything that has ever been done.”
I look back in wonderment at this letter and others like it in our archive. I was just 3 years old at the time, and my sister was not yet born, though well on the way. She arrived in August of 1957. That my mother did all of this with me, a toddler, and pregnant with my sister, is nothing less than astonishing.