Dean Shalhoup

Longtime reporter, columnist and photographer, is back doing what he does best ñ chronicling the people and history of Nashua. Reaching 40 years with The Telegraph in September, Deanís insights have a large, appreciative following.

As best as I can determine, after fairly exhaustive research “big-dig” style that involved a fair amount of dust and a few episodes of bleary eyes, Americans didn’t stoop to pointing fingers or slinging poison arrows back and forth when faced with another kind of epidemic, or pandemic, that reared its ugly head back a few generations ago.

No, I don’t mean the so-called Spanish Flu crisis, the century-ago influenza outbreak that got its oft-used name because it was thought to have originated in Spain and spread by soldiers during the Great War.

Just for the record, I couldn’t find any references to any high-ranking politicos twisting the name into some type of racist phrase to elicit cheers from a certain segment of supporters.

At any rate, I’m looking back today at the polio epidemic, which anyone of a certain age will recall striking fear into the hearts of parents whose kids did things kids love to do, especially during the carefree days of summer.

Try this: Close your eyes and try to imagine yourself inside homes where families gathered and kids played – with nary an electronic device anywhere to be found, where the most advanced marvel of modern technology was a big, white box that actually kept your food and drinks cold without the need for those big blocks of ice.

An Associated Press story in the Sept. 6, 1944 edition of The Nashua Telegraph explores the possibility that one could have contracted infantile paralysis – polio – without having any symptoms. In that way, and some other ways, polio resembled the COVID-19 virus cases some seven decades later.

From the World War II years through much of the 60s that was Anytown USA, and Nashua was no exception. The summer months have always meant a lot of swimming, but in those days, when only the super-rich had swimming pools in their backyard and public pools were as scarce as hens teeth, kids in Anytown – say, Nashua – found and adopted their favorite spots along the Nashua and Merrimack rivers, Salmon Brook and maybe a couple of other smaller waterways.

But experts and medical folks (without, presumably, the unwelcome interference from high-ranking pols that I’ve heard is a thing these days) became increasingly confident polio – clinical name poliomyelitis, aka infantile paralysis, because children were almost always stricken – was easiest spread in and around swimming areas.

Nashua of course had its fair share of “swimming holes,” the names of probably half of which I couldn’t, or wouldn’t print today. Not only did they spell relief from summer heat, these little gathering spots by their very nature served as informal social clubs, where the kids policed their own and served as de-facto lifeguards for the small fry membership.

So imagine their chagrin when mom and dad enacted their version of an emergency order, which in so many words forbade the practice of hanging out down at the swimmin’ hole.

Through the lens of “everything went slower and took more time back then,” the same went for the spread of polio, especially as compared with the scourge we face today. And here’s betting that the defiant kids, the ones who blew off orders to avoid swimming holes, were far rarer back then as compared to the astonishing number of utterly stubborn, strikingly insolent anti-mask and anti-guidelines types we find among us today.

It appears the polio threat was present more than a decade before it began making headlines on a regular basis.

References popped up now and then in the 1920s, but with the dawn of the 30s, it wasn’t unusual to hear something on the radio or read something in the newspaper about polio.

The unfortunate part was that experts weren’t able for quite awhile to define polio’s cause, and as anyone who has battled chronic health issues can attest, no diagnosis is almost always worse than even a challenging diagnosis.

“How’s Your Health,” a syndicated column the Telegraph ran back in the pre-World War II era, focused on polio in a September 1931 submission.

The writer, a physician from the New York Academy of Medicine, suggested “today’s widespread travelling” was “hastening the spread of most epidemic diseases,” of which polio was one.

However, “our quarantine practices are better than they ever were,” he wrote, crediting health officers for their “effective efforts to curb” the spread.

Essential to avoid contracting a disease is “knowing how the disease spreads,” he wrote, before acknowledging that “unfortunately, we do not definitely know how infantile paralysis is spread.”

All they knew in ’31 was polio was caused by “some living organism that is too small to be seen under our most powerful microscopes.”

They also knew that the best way to avoid catching polio was to act responsibly, which meant adhering to certain guidelines.

Anyone showing symptoms “should be strictly quarantined. Nobody but those attending the patient should come in contact” with him or her.

All utensils and other objects the patient has contact with should be disinfected. All homes should have window and door screens and “guarded against insects.”

Dust should be suppressed. Milk should be pasteurized. Food must be guarded against contamination.

“Children should be kept away from crowds.

“Common drinking cups should be avoided.”

And, if a child develops “suspicious symptoms,” he or she should be “put to bed and a physician called at once.”

And I’d bet my car against a jelly doughnut that if experts had “wear a facemask in public” on that list, everyone would go out and find one and wear it, simply because it was the right thing to do.

Dean Shalhoup’s column appears weekly in The Sunday Telegraph. He may be reached at 594-1256 or dshalhoup@nashuatelegraph.com.

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