Yup, that's what cured polio. We stopped swimming in poop. I remember the sugar cube, though. I still have the little business card sized record of my oral polio vaccination. It was given to me at the gym in Sleepy Hollow School, I think...
All areas of the creek in San Anselmo were sure places to contract Polio in the 1950s... at least that was the line my parents gave us boys to keep us out of the creek. But in the those days no one really knew much about Polio except the devastating damage it did to one's life. It seemed like everyone knew someone who was spending time in an "iron lung" or had died from it.
My father used to call the area between Larkspur and Bon Air "Polio Park." Always interesting to me how it used to be a popular swimming place, back when sewage went directly into the creek!
Does anyone else remember walking to school at Neil Cummins? That's where I learned about POLIO WATER.
I think it was '51 or '52. We had to walk over the creek and it was covered with green algae, or ???. Anyway, that was stagnant water and supposedly that is how one contracted polio.
To get polio was reallly serious, you could be crippled, or worse, spend the rest of your life in an IRON LUNG!
