Remembering Wytheville’s polio epidemic, 75 years ago

For 13-year-old Jean Kitts Lester, the finality of polio struck home when schools reopened. 

“A small town, you knew all the kids in school, just about,” said Lester, now 88, in an interview at Wytheville’s Thomas J. Boyd Museum. “The roll was called every day, alphabetical order. The first couple days back, I had a friend, her last name was Taylor, and when it got to the Ts, her name wasn’t called. There were several vacancies like that, your friends had died. That was bad.”

Another visual memory is of kids in braces struggling to climb the steps at Wytheville High School, and upperclassmen carrying freshmen and sophomores to their classrooms on the top floor.

Lester is one of a dwindling number who remember the summer of 1950, when Wytheville had one of the nation’s highest per-capita rates of polio infection. The town with a population of 5,500 suffered 180-plus reported cases (plus others probably unreported). The death rate was higher than the state average, indicating a particularly virulent strain.

The poliovirus is highly infectious. It primarily spreads through ingestion of minute particles of fecal matter and can be transmitted through eating contaminated food, drinking contaminated water, or putting an infected finger or toy in the mouth. Children are especially susceptible, although it can strike at any age.

In the pre-industrial era, polio was endemic. Almost everyone was exposed to it. Most had few or no symptoms and developed immunity to subsequent infection. Mothers passed immunity to babies through breast milk. Herd immunity prevented mass outbreaks.

The germ theory of disease, widely accepted by the late 19th century, led to the development of safe water supplies, better hygiene practices and food inspection programs. An unintended consequence was a decline in herd immunity to polio, setting the stage for the polio epidemics of the 20th century. The first major U.S. epidemic in 1916 infected 27,000 and killed 7,000. More epidemics followed. The most famous victim was the active and athletic Franklin D. Roosevelt, who, over two terrifying days in 1921, lost the use of his lower body. (Some doctors later attributed his paralysis to Guillain-Barré syndrome, while others still believe polio is the right diagnosis.) FDR later founded the organization that became the March of Dimes; that’s why his head is on the 10-cent piece.

In 1950, Wytheville was a typical small town. In the summer, crowds gathered at Withers Field to watch the Wytheville Statesmen. The second baseman was Jim Seccafico.

On June 28, Seccafico’s infant son, John, came down with a stiff neck and fever. Later, he started shaking and was rushed to Memorial and Crippled Children’s Hospital (later Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital). On June 30, little John was diagnosed with polio. A month later, 10 people were dead.

According to the CDC, most people infected with the poliovirus have no symptoms. About one in four have flu-like symptoms. A small percentage of those develop weakness or paralysis —including inability to breathe.

“Ambulance sirens wailed all summer during the polio epidemic,” according to a display in Wytheville’s Boyd Museum. “In a bit of irony, hearses often doubled as ambulances in 1950. After the first fatality, funeral director D.L. Barnett purchased large quantities of infant caskets, and feared the worse.”

The hearses raced up U.S. 11 to Roanoke. Driver Robert Archer, whose own children had polio, often made several trips per day. 

“Whole floors of the hospital were full of patients, infants to adults,” Dr. Louis Ripley later recalled. If power failed — for example, during a thunderstorm — all hands rushed to the polio ward to pump the iron lungs by hand. The iron lung, a dreaded symbol of the 20th century, was essentially a pressurized can that forced air in and out of the patient’s lungs. “There was so little we could do,” Ripley said.

The poliovirus did not discriminate by race, but the medical system did. The Roanoke hospital refused Black patients. They were sent to St. Philip Hospital in Richmond. “But this may have been a blessing in disguise, for not one of those who were sent to Richmond died,” according to then-mayor William Arthur, quoted in “A Summer Without Children,” published by Wytheville’s Department of Museums. “This brings up the question: was there better care in Richmond than in Roanoke?”

The Kitts family, including Jean Kitts Lester, was more fortunate than some. The epidemic was mostly confined to Wytheville. The Kittses lived on a farm west of town on Old Stage Road. Life continued as usual. Lester and her siblings milked the cows, fed the pigs, tended the chickens and played outside. 

Lester wasn’t afraid of polio, but relatives were. She had a 5-year-old cousin on Franklin Street in Wytheville. The neighbor children on both sides were stricken. “My aunt and uncle were very afraid for her, so they sent her to the country to live with us.”

Labor Day came and went, and schools remained closed. Lester and her siblings gathered around the radio to hear teachers read stories. “They would read an exciting book and only read a chapter and leave you hanging until tomorrow.” In the 1950 version of online learning, teachers gave lessons over the radio.

Meanwhile, at the University of Pittsburgh’s Virus Research Laboratory, Dr. Jonas Salk was working on a vaccine using killed poliovirus particles. Funding from the March of Dimes kept him going.

In late August, cases began to decline. In October, schools opened. The holidays were hard for many families that year, with empty seats at Thanksgiving and Christmas. 

Dolores Jean Thompson was left with severe upper-body weakness. She used an iron lung as a respite from consciously focusing on every breath. She died in 2012, one of the last people in the United States to use an iron lung. Decades after the epidemic, some survivors came down with post-polio syndrome, with symptoms including weakness, fatigue, and speech and breathing problems. Others who lived through the epidemic chose to go into health care, such as Lester, who became a nurse, and Betty Allison Mallory, who became a physical therapist.

Why Wytheville? Experts from the Virginia Department of Health couldn’t pinpoint the cause. “Investigations were made of water, milk supplies, sewage disposal, fly prevalence and personal contact with other cases. To date the study has revealed no common denominator among the cases reported.” 

On April 12, 1955, Jonas Salk announced the results of a nationwide study: his injectable polio vaccine was safe and effective. Mass vaccinations began, and polio rates fell dramatically. But some recipients developed paralysis due to improperly inactivated virus in batches from Cutter Laboratories, one of the manufacturers. In 1961, Dr. Albert Sabin’s sugar-cube vaccine replaced Salk’s as the main vaccine in the United States.

Lester took her children, born in 1963 and 1964, to get the Sabin vaccine. “People were lined up all the way to Main Street to get the sugar cubes. Everybody got the polio vaccine, there was none of this nonsense of ‘what’s it going to do to you.’ It’s going to keep you from getting polio. It was a Sunday, everybody was here. Nobody hesitated, ’cause what could be worse?”

Despite missteps, the fight against polio stands as one of the greatest achievements of medicine. The wild poliovirus was declared eradicated in the Western Hemisphere in 1994. In the next few decades, fearful images of epidemics like Wytheville’s will pass from living memory.

For more reading:

“A Summer Without Children” and “The Little Hospital That Could”

‘A wonderful place to grow up’

If not for the epidemic raging in town — admittedly a large “if” — Wythe County in 1950 was, in many respects, a healthier place for kids and teens than just about any place in 2025. 

There were no cellphones, no social media, no ultra-processed food. TVs were few and far between. Jean Kitts Lester was close to all her grandparents, ate farm-raised natural food and got plenty of fresh air and exercise doing farm chores and playing in woods, creeks and fields. 

“We had a grapevine swing you could swing out and drop into the creek,” she said. “Before we were quarantined, we had a neighborhood bunch of kids that was always together. We went to the one-room school together, we went to church together. We always had enough for a ball team. 

“None of us had any money, but we were never hungry, we had plenty of clothes. If you were playing at someone’s house, or in their field or in their barn, their parents were in charge of you. If one person needed spanking you got it, and when you got home you got another one. Of all those kids that I grew up with, not one was in trouble.

“We had a wonderful place to grow up.”