Some people remember things that go way back into their childhood and some do not recall much of their early years at all. I have some early memories that stand out in my mind. The earliest memory that I had to was that we were going to have a new baby in the family. I remember exactly where we were driving while my parents discussed what they would name the new baby. Don, after my Dad if it were a boy, and Donna, also after my Dad if it was a girl. I remember getting out of the car in the driveway at my grandparents, where we lived. My mother's favorite yellow climbing rose was blooming on the white picket fence in my grandmother's back yard. It is interesting how little things will stick in your mind.
I remember my mother going into labor. The next day my grandmother, Nana, sitting at the phone talking to my Dad about the new baby ....A Boy! I asked my grandmother what he looked like she said he was red all over. I said," like an Indian? Does he have a Feather behind his ear?" I was so excited I wanted to see my brother right away. But, I had to wait, Donnie was born on December 13, (our family's lucky number 13). He was my Christmas present. I loved him from the start.
The next memory that I had was of everyone taking his photo and asking me to move over so they could get a picture of the baby. I still remember feeling left out and a little jealous. Mother must have noticed this because she let me poise for the next picture with my baby brother in my arms. In the photo you could see how pleased I was.
Later that year in the summer, we had a rain storm and the water at the corner was deep enough for the kids on the block to play in. I wanted to play there too, but mother said that I could not. There was a lot of polio going around, and she did not want me to catch it. I could not play in the gutter like the other kids.
Everyone was worried about an out break of polio. At that time there was nothing that could be done for polio except to pray, and hope that nobody in your family got it. There was a big out break of the disease in neighboring North Carolina. They had actually closed the border between Virginia and Carolina just below where we lived in Norfolk, VA. In spite of all mother's precautions, I got polio at the age of four in 1948. First I had the measles. It must have been German Measles, because they kept me in a darkened room, for fear of the light effecting my eye sight. Sometime shortly after that I had a strep throat. My parents had gone out for an evening. I hurt so bad, I remember crying for my mother. My Nana tried to comfort me. The next morning, they called the doctor to come. He examined me and asked me if I could walk. I remember saying that I could not, but that I could crawl. "Just put me down on the floor and I'll show you."
My Dad picked me up carried me to the car. Mother held me in her arms, and we hurried to the hospital. Here they gave me a spinal tap to see if I had polio. I remember screaming. No one had ever hurt me like that. Mother heard me, but they would not let her come to me. They put me in isolation. When she could mother sat in the room with me for hours on end and read to me. She said at one point she was afraid that I might die. After a while they put me in a room with a glass window on one wall. They wrapped my legs and arms with hot wet wool to keep my muscles from contracting. The smell of wet wool made me feel sick well into my thirties. Mother was upset with my paternal grandmother, because she did not come to visit for fear of germs. She did stand on the other side of the window and waved at me. She had been through this before as my dad's older brother also had polio as a child. He had no visible effects for polio and even serve in the army during World War II.
My mother hated to leave my side, so my Nana (maternal grandmother), and good friends took turns during the day taking care of my brother. I missed him and wanted to go home. They transferred me from Norfolk General to De Paul Hospital, to their children's ward. There were a lot of beds with lots of children in a large room. The Nuns, Sister's of Mercy, worked wonders there. They were nice. Some of the nurses were not. One Nun asked me if I were Catholic, and some how at four years old I knew to say that I was Methodist.
In the ward with me there were children in iron lungs. Without these they could not breath. When there were thunder storms the electricity would go out. All the men would take turns cranking a generator in order to keep the iron lungs working. Without these devises the children in them would have die. There were others that came into the children's ward too. There was a little Chinese girl, whose mean brother had put her in a box and put fire to it. She was terribly burned. there was an older girl who had fallen off a horse while riding and had a metal plate in her head. There was one small boy that I was particularly fond of. He had polio too. It effected his arm. We actually met again after I had married.
The Doctors were very nice. One young doctor did paper cuttings for the children. I met my Doctor for the first time there, Johnny Van. He was a young Doctor who walked with a limp. It turned out that he had contracted polio as a child. The smell of alcohol permeated the air as you moved about the hospital. This smell also bothered me for a long time. I was in De Paul for months. One day my mother asked me as I pleaded with her to stay,"What would you like me to bring you tomorrow?"
I answered, "Please bring me a fairy."
Oh dear, my Mother thought. She did not want to let me down, but a fairy. How on earth was she to find a fairy for her daughter? That evening she worried and thought. The next day she she came in carrying a very small doll with wings made out of a man's shirt collar decorated with sequins and a soft gossamer dress. I knew that this was just a doll, but mother had a story that went with the doll.
She and my Dad had pulled the car into the drive and from the garden area she heard a tiny cry like a tingling of a bell. She walked over to discover a tiny fairy who was caught up in a web. My father reached down and freed her and lifted her up. Mother told her that her young daughter had been very sick and was still in the hospital. Her only desire was to have them bring her a fairy the next day. Would she go to the hospital with them? "Oh....I can't," she said, "It is way too dangerous, I might even die if I go. But, I will help you." At that she took out some fairy dust and turned a small doll into a fairy doll. "Tell your little girl that it was not possible for me to come, but I will visit you and tell you some stories of the fairies. "Mother was ready with stories that she had made up and written down to read to me. For years I thought that there were fairies in the garden at my grandparents home.
There was one definite high light to my hospital stay. The nurses gathered all the children that were able to be moved into a solarium room for the much anticipated visit of Jean Audry, the famous singing cowboy. I was able to brag about this for years. As another special treat they gave us was hot dogs for our lunch. We all felt very special.
One of the visits that I particularly looked forward to was that of my Uncle Billy, Nana's brother. Every time that he'd come to visit he would bring me bubble gum. One time I asked him where did he get all that bubble gum. He told me that he had a very special bush in his backyard that had gum as it's fruit. At the time I had trouble believing this, but I persisted. Could I see this marvelous bush. One day after I had recovered we went to visit, and there in his back yard was a bush with gum hanging all over attached with scotch tape. He had gone to a lot of trouble to make a little girl happy.
I was finally able to come home for a visit, and then at last home for good. Mother had to do physical therapy to try to keep my legs limber. They had always told me that the polio had effected me from my shoulders down. Some how I never thought that it had effected my arms. That was until I went to be tested for Post Polio Syndrome. Suddenly I went from being a paraplegic to being a quadriplegic.
.After I had polio and was home. I remember learning to walk with crutches. This was an adventure. Although in the beginning I had braces on both my legs and a corset on my back I remember being able to swing off a curb. I felt like I was flying. I was the poster child for the march of dimes in the Norfolk, Va. area when I was six or seven. There was a picture of me walking with crutches that was blown up to life size and it appeared in a window of a store on the main street in downtown. For years we kept this in our attic.
After I had been home from the hospital for a while, Doctor Vann decided that it would be a good idea if we went to Warm Springs GA. to the facility there where President Roosevelt had gone. The Warm Springs Foundation was know for their work with rehabilitating people who had polio. He wanted to make sure that I was getting the best care possible.
We got into our car to travel all the way to Georgia. My uncle Judd had married Helen Matthews, she joined us on our trip. Along with Helen came her new cat, Tandy, a beautiful Siamese kitten with big blue eyes. During the night stay in a motel, Tandy decided to play with the light attached to the head board. She walked the head board and batted with her paw at the chain that dangled just above my Dad's head. He was not overly fond of cats and remained asleep as we held our breath.
When we got to Georgia, we stayed with Helen's family. It was there that I saw a TV for the first time. It was small and almost round. The black and white picture on the tube was very fuzzy. It was interesting and memorable to a little girl. Helen's family were very nice to us and a lot of fun. I think it was her sister that told me that they used to make dolls out of corn husk, using corn silk for hair. It was there that I discovered that there was such a thing as yellow watermelon.
When we stayed in Warm Springs, the streets in town had wooden sidewalks, and the water in the hotel tasted terrible. The doctors at the foundation said that Dr. Vann was as good a doctor as any one that they had on staff, and that I was very lucky to have him as my doctor. We visited the little White House where President Roosevelt stayed when he visited there for treatments. We made two trips there and they get mixed up in my memory, but on the last one I believe I had my first loose tooth. I wiggled it all the way there and all the way back home. We even tried the trick of tying a string on the tooth and a door nob, slamming the door....but of course it did not work.
The Appalachian Mountains, run all the way into Georgia. We visited a State Park in the mountains. In a general store my parents bought me my first pair of blue jeans, and a toy monkey. On the way back we listened to the radio play "the Tennessee Waltz." I also remember the kudzu that had taken over large areas along the road side in Georgia even covering homes. At that point it was out of control.
Due to going to Warm Springs, and operations to keep my limbs straight, I could not attend kindergarten. Mother ordered books from the Calvert School for kinder garden. I had a operation and my body was in a cast from my waist down encasing both legs. One of the things that I remembered was that we made a model of a farm. With little plastic animals including ducks that mother made a pond for out of a mirror.
They did all sorts of things to keep my mind busy. They ordered an ant farm. Where the ants built their community between two sheets of glass.
Several girls would come by to play. One of these was one of my best friends today, Polly. She came up from The Dominican Republic, where her father was a British Banker. Her grandparents lived down the street from my grandparents, when she was in town they brought her by to visit. We played with clay making all sorts of things like rabbits, turtles, cats and dogs as well as food for them to eat.
I was able to start real school in first grade. I went to Ferebee's School, a little private school run in the Sunday school area of Saint Andrew's Church around the corner from our house on Graydon Avenue in Norfolk, Va. To keep my legs warm Mother dressed me in my wool coat and leggings. This was a fine and dandy until I had to take the leggings off and put them back on. I remember sitting on the landing of the stairs struggling to get them on and off. I was always behind. Finally I just told mother that I was not going to wear the leggings any more. We bought high socks for me to wear in the colder weather and that solved that problem. I still remember the coldness of wearing dresses in the winter.
The first time that I realized that I was some what different was while I was in school there. Some child, that I did not know, asked me why I walked with crutches. I knew that I walked with crutches, but my good friends accepted me as who I was. To my mind I was normal, I just used crutches to get around. I have never viewed my self as handicapped in any way. With the aid of my crutches I could do anything the other kids did. I played on the playground, climbing up the slide, swinging on the swings, climbing the monkey bars. I even remember standing on a merry go around thing that was kid powered, falling and knocking my breath out just like any other kid.
While I was at the Ferebee School my mother helped to pay for my tuition by acting as the art teacher for the school. I am sure that it helped pay my way, but it also served as a way for her to keep an eye on me.
The school was not quite a block from our house on Graydon Avenue. Mother either walked me home from school or some one in the family would pick me up. One day they were late. So I took it upon myself to walk home on my own, after all I knew the way. The thing was that I wanted to experiment. I decided to take the long way home. I went down the street that crossed Graydon over to the street that ran behind the house Westover Avenue. There was a field that had overgrown behind my grandparents home. I decided to walk back through this field. This took much longer than I had expected. When I got home hot, tired and dirty. Both my mom and my Nana were frantic with worry. Boy, did I get it. I never did that again. The fascination with the field behind and next to the house continued. My friends and I would explore the trails and the fields. We would pick the wild blackberries and my mother or grandmother would make a blackberry pie. We would pick great bunches of the wild flowers especially in the fall to carry into the house. Once I picked a bunch of golden rod for my paternal grandmother, who would not take them because she thought that she was allergic to them. I have always loved going into the wilds.
We put on a show for our parents at the end of each year. We would march in to the tune of " the Animals on Parade." We would stand on the stage and sing at the top of our voices. After the second grade, I graduated to the public elementary School, Walter Heron Taylor School. My teacher Mrs Sills did a good job of keeping us all in line. We put on a show "Jack and the Beanstalk." I was a magic Harp. There were several of us girls in party dresses holding paper harps covered with Aluminum foil and yarn for strings.
That year Dr. Van said that I was going to need to have another operation. I was not happy about this at all. But of course we went ahead and proceeded with the operation. The day that I arrived at the hospital there were a couple of small boys racing around in the big wicker wheel chairs that were standard then in hospitals. One boy had an operation for a club foot, the other a broken leg. There was a little girl with a hair lip. The morning of the operation the nurses forgot to get Mother to sign the release form. So the doctor came into the operating room and said that they were going to have to wait until they found mother. She had gone to the coffee shop to get a cup of coffee. While they were waiting on the signature, he proceeded to tell the nurses exactly what he intended to do. When he finished, I repeated his instructions to the nurses. I have claustrophobia, so when the nurse went to put the mask for the ether over my nose, I resisted. The nurse who was not as kind as she should have been said. If you don't like it just count backwards. I fought that thing until I passed out with the ether.
There was a sweet little girl my age in the adjoining room she would come into my room to visit. She had anemia and later died. There was not much hope then for children with that type of cancer. Thankfully now there is bone marrow transplants, that have saved children like her.
They took me home from the hospital in an ambulance. I needed to be in the cast from my waist down again for a couple of months. Mother did things to help me past the time. We got a parakeet. I named him Jojo. We tried to teach him to talk. He did not say much; however one time he looked at my Dad and called him stupid. He would use my cast as a landing pad and skid from one end to the other. When Mother would pin her patterns to cut a piece of material he would pull the pins out and drop them over the side of the bed where she was working. The funniest thing that happened occurred when my brother, who was a little over four at the time decided to pretend to go hunting. He had a pop gun with a cork attached with a cord. He put the gun over his shoulder and walked around the apartment saying, "Where is that bird? I'm going to get me a bird." We all started laughing. He could not understand why. Jojo was perched on the end of the gun he had slung over his shoulder.
When it came time to take my cast off. Doctor Van came to our home to cut it off with a cast saw that was designed to cut off when it hit something soft. The cast was lined with cotton and a stocking material. The saw made a lot of noise. and produced a lot of heat. It scared me but did not hurt. The pin that held one leg in place did hut when he pulled it out. We had a maid that when out back and started praying. Poor Doctor Van bent over to work on cutting off the cast and threw his back out. He said that he had to sleep on the floor for at least a week.
I am a romantic, I guess I've always been one. I remember pining away for my hero and next door neighbor, Dumpy. I was only eight years old. He was a whole year older and could do no wrong in my estimation. He lived with his parents and grandmother next door. We had moved from my grandparents home to an apartment across the driveway from Dumpy's house. When I had my operation for polio, he rigged a walkie talkie from their kitchen to my bedroom. When I think about it we had sort of an "Our Gang" time. He was the hero and my brother and I were his followers. We had wonderful made up adventures. We slipped through the window to their basement, only to be scared of being discovered. Being scared made it that much more exciting.
We explored the back of our apartment and one time the garages behind us were left open and the three of us explored the interior. These garages were used as storage unites, we walked through looking, but not touching piles of furniture and assorted things. It was spooky and fun. Our imagination took all sorts of turns figuring out stories about the pieces. Now that I think about it, this was perhaps one reason that I like finding old things.
One time he climbed up unto the roof of one of the garages. I wanted to join him up there. But there was no way for me to get up unto the roof. There was a tree that grew next to the garage. I could do a lot of things, but I did have the sense to know when I was beat. Well, not to give up I could live vicariously. I told my little brother exactly how to climb up unto that roof. Unfortunately once up there he became very scared and started to cry. The only thing for me to do was to fess up and get my mother to help him down. Oh yes, I was in big trouble.
I new that I was in love with Dumpy as a little girl, that was my first love.
I had many crushes and was some what devastated when one of my girl friends started dating Dumpy, now using his real name, Harry.
The year that I graduated from grade school we had a school dance for graduation. I was a grown up twelve year old. At that dance one of my friends, who was also a boy gave me a kiss. Never having this happen before, and not knowing what to do, as well as having seen too many old Judy Garland movies I believe that I slapped his face. I really would love to apologize to him now. I am really sorry.
After graduation from grade school and because the junior high school and high school had too many steps, for me with a long leg brace and crutches, my grandparents helped my parents send me to a private school. This was a private all girl school that taught the classics. The Graham School, in Norfolk Va., was the center of my life as a young girl. It was an institution or maybe a relic from the Victorian era. This was a school for young ladies. When I attended the school, there were about sixty five to seventy students total in grades seven through twelve. These young ladies received a classical education. We were required to take six full years of Latin. I never really understood what taking a dead language would do for me. However, while majoring in Art History in College I learned that I could read a lot of Italian when studying Renaissance Art. I also realized that my scores on the English S.A.T.'s were greatly improved by those six years of Latin. At the time I would have rather done something else. Especially at exam time. I think I tried to memorize Cesar's Gallic Wars in English in order to just pass Latin. One of my favorite classes was ancient history. We also took three years of French.
Our English courses required a lot of writing and reading. All those book reports helped me be able to write and think as well. My math teacher Miss Batten was Walter Reed's granddaughter, she never mentioned this. The school was run by two old maid sisters the Misses Grahams. Miss Sarah was the oldest and the head mistress, her sister Miss Cary taught lower grade English. I remember what a stickler she was for grammar. I had a tough time with grammar in seventh grade, but it was very necessary for Latin to know English grammar. The one thing lacking was science. They added this for our class in ninth grade, due to some parents complaining. For art we would go to take Saturday classes with a local artist in his studio. My dad was just as happy not to have me be too influenced by other artist's style.
While I was in school there, I did the same sort of things that other girls did. I took classes in ball room dance with the other girls. I could dance slow dances but not the fast ones. It was at this time that I probably had more problems with being handicapped. The old adage, " Boys don't make passes at girls that wear glasses," is even worse for those who have crutches. I did not feel like I dated much; however, when I look back I realize that I did have a fairly good amount of dates. While at Graham School, I dated a brother of one of the girls in my class for about two years. He even asked me to his Senior Prom. I turned him down. Which I realize was not very nice. I had gone to one other dance with him at his school I did not know anyone there. I ended up sitting at a table all night. I did not want to do that again.
There were only twelve of us in my class and I was a good student but not the highest achiever. I've always been able to brag that I was in the top 10 of my class, only to admit that that was not such a great feat since there so few in our class. In fact there were several very high achievers in the class I would have been lucky to have been in the top half of my class.
My senior year we all started applying to colleges. I really wanted to go away to school; however, my parents decided that it was too dangerous for me to be away from home. Seeing that they made some sense coupled with the fact that there was a college in town, I gave in. I applied to and was accepted to The Division of William and Mary in Norfolk, which became that fall Old Dominion College.
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