Read this, Songwronger, and read it well!

I don't remember because I was too young at the time, but my parents told me that I was a healthy, husky kid, and once I had taken my first steps, I used to run around the house just for the sheer exuberance of it.

Then, when I was two years and three months old, I contracted poliomyelitis, known in those days as "infantile paralysis." After the disease ran its course, my legs were paralyzed. No more running. No more walking. Anywhere I went, I had to either crawl like a baby or be carried by one of my parents. For any long distances, even though I was no longer an infant, and getting heavier to carry, my parents pushed me in a baby carriage.

When I was about five or six, several times a week, my mother drove me to a physical therapy sanitarium in a nearby city (we were living in Southern California at the time) where I was fitted with leg braces (heavy steel things with lots of leather straps and buckles that locked my legs straight) and taught to walk, slowly and laboriously, with canes, carefully swinging each leg forward for each step.

When the other kids, my sisters and kids from the neighborhood, were playing in the front yard (tag, hide-and-seek, kick-the-can, cowboys and Indians, etc.), I sat on the front porch and watched.

At the age of six, my parents made arrangements with the local school district to enroll me in its home teaching program—for kids like me. They sent a teacher to our house about three times a week for a couple of hours, so I got a lot of personal attention from the teacher. But none of the socialization of attending school with other kids. In addition to doing my homework, I spent a lot of time belly-flopped on the living room rug reading or drawing. I read a lot of books for a kid my age, and I got to be a pretty good cartoonist.

I had physical therapy on and off for the next several years (I was taught to swim, and swam a lot), until it was deemed I could get around well enough to go to public school. I began attending Seattle's Roosevelt High School in my junior year. I graduated, then enrolled at the University of Washington as an English Literature major, specifically in "Creative Writing."

In high school and on into college, although I had lots of friends, it didn't take me long to learn that normal dating or having a steady girl friend was going to be pretty dicey. I was a good-looking kid (if I do say so myself), but it's a bit unnerving to ask a girl for a date and, as she turns you down for one feeble reason or another, you know perfectly well she just doesn't want to go out with someone who's galumphing around on crutches. Or repeatedly hearing those dreaded but trite words, "Can't we just be friends?"

One steady girl friend I did have when I was at the U. of W. was the girl who got me seriously interested in folk music in the first place. Claire was bright and intelligent and could see beyond the obvious externals. We went together for a couple of years before she graduated and had to move to another city. And, yes, I've had other girl friends, all of whom, I am happy to say, were less interested in externals than they were in matters of intelligence, character, and shared interests.

My wife is such a woman. We both write. We both love music of all kinds. We share many values. But I didn't meet her until I was in my forties.

There was a great deal I was not able to do. In high school and college, sports were out. I will never climb Mount Everest or scale El Capitan.

But there was a lot I could do. I have worked at a number of jobs. All at a desk, or drawing table, or a radio studio broadcast board.

And the physical handicap did not interfere with my performing folk music. For years, I did concerts, television, sang several evenings a week in clubs or coffee houses, attended folk festivals, and made a halfway decent living at it.

Have you ever seen violinist Itzhak Perlman on television or in concert? He had polio when he was young. He walks on stage lumbering along on his crutches and heavy leg braces, sits down on a chair, and someone hands him his violin and bow.

That's the way I did it also.

I'm older now, and feeling the effects of what is known as "post-polio syndrome." My shoulders will no longer carry my weight, so I get around in a wheelchair. And the scoliosis (lateral spinal curvature) that was one of the "leftovers" from polio is bothering me quite a bit these days. Pain in the back and around the rib cage, which is deformed because of the curvature.

When I was in my twenties, I spent the better part of two years in a physical therapy sanitarium in Denver, Colorado, undergoing exercises, massage, hydrotherapy, spinal traction, and anything else they could think of to try to alleviate the aftereffects of poliomyelitis—and I saw a number of other young people there with the same thing I had, including two teen aged girls, who would never have the normal life of a teen aged girl. If she's getting around slowly with crutches and leg braces, or in a wheelchair, nobody much is going to ask her to a "sock hop" or the senior prom.

Oh! How tall would I be if I hadn't had polio? Hard to say. But my father and a couple of uncles were over six feet. My father was 6'2". And my son is about the same height. They say that your height (Leonardo da Vinci's carefully measured anatomy charts revealed this early on) should equal your "wing span." Arms outstretched on either side, measuring from fingertip to fingertip. My "wing span" is 6'2". My height is about 5'9". Proportionately, my legs are shorter that they should be, judging from the size of my upper torso.

I'm not into such wastes of time and energy as self-pity. You play the cards you are dealt. On the one hand, I missed a great deal by not being "able bodied." But I probably had a better education than I would have had, because when others were out playing sports or other such physical activities, I read. And I wrote. I've had several magazine articles published. Or in my early twenties and on, practiced a great deal on the guitar and learned songs and classic guitar pieces.

Songwronger (and anyone else who has stuck with this), would I have taken the risk of possibly getting cancer if I knew it would have prevented me from contracting polio?

Knowing what I know now—unequivocally—YES!

Considering the effectiveness of the polio vaccine—having virtually wiped out polio in those parts of the world where it is being administered—and considering the low incidence of cancer in those who received the contaminated vaccine--it is morally reprehensible to try to frighten people into NOT getting the shot, especially now when the vaccine is NOT contaminated, and anyone who dissuades someone from getting the shot bears moral responsibility for the outcome if someone DOES contract polio as a result of their fearfully refusing the vaccine when available because of someone such as you promulgating misinformation about it.

Songwronger—better read "Scaremonger"—be aware of the moral responsibilities that go with the misinformation you are callously and thoughtlessly spouting!

Don Firth (been there, got the T-shirt!)