Kelly: Hackensack student in 1955 was among first to get polio shotMonday, April 12, 2010
Last updated: Monday April 12, 2010, 7:30 AM
By MIKE KELLY
RECORD COLUMNIST
Photographs tell stories — that's a fact of life.
Bob Leafe receiving his polio vaccination in 1955 at the Holy Trinity Roman Catholic elementary school in Hackensack. The photo was discovered recently at his parents' home in Teaneck.But sometimes photos also go beyond the people whose smiles or frowns are captured on film.
Such was the lesson Bob Leafe learned when he scoured through his parents' home in Teaneck after their deaths and found several grainy black and white photos of himself in another time.
Leafe found himself a part of history.
The photos capture him on an April morning in 1955, as a second-grade student at the Holy Trinity Roman Catholic elementary school in Hackensack. Leafe is only 7 years old. He is wearing a white shirt and a neatly knotted tie and sporting a bushy cowlick and a frown that betrays a none-too-subtle hint of apprehension.
He was being vaccinated for polio.
He remembers he got a lollipop.
In the public-health history of America, there is a clear dividing line — before polio vaccinations and afterward.
Before the vaccine, invented by Jonas Salk, thousands of American kids caught the crippling disease, including a young Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who went on to become president. After the vaccine few kids got polio.
That dividing line was 55 years ago today — April 12, 1955 — when the federal government gave its stamp of approval to Salk's vaccine. Eight days later, on April 20, 1955, Robert Leafe's second-grade class received its vaccinations in the Holy Trinity school auditorium, making them among the first schoolchildren in America to get the drug.
"Newsreel cameras were there," Leafe's mother, Eunice, wrote in her diary that day, in a graceful penmanship that featured tight loops on her "L's" and "S's."
"They followed Bobby all the way through," she continued, "from his entrance through his shot, and even to the huge lollypops all the kids got."
Leafe has no memory of the cameras or even watching the news footage on an early version of the television news that night, even though his mother's diary mentions that the Holy Trinity vaccinations were featured at 6:45 p.m. In fact, Leafe, who went on to become a widely respected rock-and-roll photographer who captured Bruce Springsteen, John Lennon and other music luminaries, recalls nothing of his brief moment in health history.
"I just don't remember — it was over half-a-century ago," he said the other day from his Hackensack apartment. "I'm sure I didn't smile."
If pictures tell the story, Leafe definitely did not smile.
One photo shows him standing in line with seven classmates. A girl, her hands folded in front of her school uniform, seems stoic and intensely curious as she gazes ahead. A boy rubs his pinky finger and also looks ahead. Another boy glances at the camera, his brow furrowed.
No one is smiling.
In another photo, Leafe is sitting in a chair and receiving his polio vaccination in his right bicep by a man — presumably a doctor — who wears a suit. Another man — perhaps also a doctor — looks on, as do three nurses in starched white hats and uniforms.
No one is smiling.
Perhaps everyone would be smiling — cheering even — if they understood what the Salk anti-polio vaccine meant for the health of children in the coming decades. But of course, no one could know on that April day in 1955 that Salk's was nothing less than the first step in the virtual eradication of polio.
The Salk Institute for Biological Studies, which Salk founded in 1960 near San Diego, reports that the last known case of polio in America occurred in 1979. But at its peak in the early 1950s, polio was being diagnosed at a rate of 13.6 cases per 100,000 people.
Compared to the current incidence of cancer in America — 566 cases per 100,000 people — the rate of polio may not seem like much. But to families with a child who contracted polio, the impact was often devastating.
Suddenly, strong, vibrant children were rendered almost motionless. Many were eventually able to walk with the aid of steel braces. Many had to resort to wheelchairs.
There was no cure until 1955, when Salk, then a 40-year-old physician and medical researcher at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, developed a safe vaccine. Salk, who died in 1995 at the age of 80, is now celebrated as one of America's foremost scientists.
The vaccine that bears his name, however, could not have been introduced at a more fearsome moment. The post-World War II baby boom was in full swing. Only three years earlier, in 1952, the United States had endured its worst polio epidemic, with nearly 58,000 cases reported.
Many children recovered, but more than 3,000 died and another 21,000 were left paralyzed.
That was just one year. Many other years featured equally devastating statistics of death and paralysis.
As Bob Leafe, now 62, studies the old photos of his vaccination, he ponders the irony, too — how he was unable at the time to fully comprehend what this momentarily painful pinch of his skin would mean.
He wonders if his class was the first to be vaccinated. The Salk Institute confesses that it doesn't know.
"My research shows 9 million doses of the vaccine were ordered by the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (later know as the March of Dimes), it may be impossible to identify just what place in the vaccine timeline the Holy Trinity kids held," said the Institute's librarian, Carol Bodes, in an e-mail. "In all honesty, I get calls every year from people claiming to be 'the first' and wanting their vaccination records."
Unfortunately, says Bodes, the institute does not keep those records.
"It is my understanding," she said, "that school-age children were vaccinated en masse, across the country to halt the vicious spread of the disease. I found no reference to the school [Holy Trinity] in the Salk papers, but that's not unusual, as they are not highly detailed."
As for Bob Leafe, he wishes he had been more aware of what was happening to his second-grade class when they were summoned for their vaccinations. "I wish I was older at the time so I could appreciate the significance of it," he said. "But I was just a 7-year-old kid who was told he was getting a shot. I didn't appreciate it as much then as I do now."
None of us did.