I grew up in South Dakota in the 1950s, a time when vaccines weren’t available for many childhood illnesses.
Any immunity I had as a schoolboy to things like measles, mumps and chickenpox, I received by catching the disease and suffering through it. I don’t know why anyone would willingly go through that process if a vaccine was available to prevent it. I wouldn’t have.
I’ve been thinking about those early years in recent times. Every so often, the federal government revises its guidelines for childhood immunizations. I confess, I have trouble keeping up with what exactly it is they are telling people. I haven’t had kids in school for decades, but I have grandchildren and a handful of great-grandchildren. It matters to me how they are being protected from preventable illnesses. I just struggle to stay current on what’s happening.
In my childhood, there wasn’t much to keep up on. Kids came home from school with a rash and a cough, or they woke up with such symptoms, and parents pretty much self-doctored, especially in families like mine that lived eight miles from the nearest town with a modest drug store and 20 or so miles from a town with an actual medical doctor, nurse, clinic or hospital. Unless the medical issue was an honest-to-goodness emergency, treatment began and ended at home.
I don’t know how long it took after she started having babies, but over time, my mom learned to spot symptoms quickly. All mothers did in those days, I suppose. I say mothers not because some – perhaps many – fathers were unaware of what was going on in the health care world in their homes but because my awareness of the Lyman County rural neighborhood where I grew up is that mothers did the nursing.
The kitchen pantry in our home had a small pharmacy section – the over-the-counter sorts of ointments and bandages and other treatments for scrapes, ailments and infectious diseases. I remember things like mercurochrome and Merthiolate and foul-smelling Vick’s rub and calamine lotion and some brown-tinted bottle with a dropper that held a liquid to be warmed and dripped into a kid’s ear to ease an ache. I had any number of ear infections as a kid. My mom used the dropper about as often as she used the gas oven or the kitchen sink. If the ear infection was accompanied by any sort of cough at all, she called it “the croup,’’ and I lay next to the furnace grate under a tent made of our clothes-drying rack and a scratchy brown Army blanket while a steamer bubbled away next to me. Man, I disliked that treatment. I have to say, at some point in a night, I usually turned the corner and started feeling better.
During my childhood, I had chickenpox, mumps and two or three different strains of measles. It seems to me I caught those things at school in Reliance, where first, second and third grade students were all in one room. There’s a good chance I caught the ailments from a cousin. There were enough of those in that three-grade room. Of course, there’s a good chance some of them caught it from me, too, before I was kept home on the farm for several days to let the disease run its course.
Staying home with measles or chickenpox meant lying for hours on end in a bedroom with the window shades pulled tight to keep annoying light from irritating my eyes. I remember dozing the time away, coming awake every so often to find my mom sitting next to the bed watching me sleep. She wet washcloths with cool water and laid them across my forehead now and then. With the chickenpox, and I think the measles, too, she took cotton swabs and coated the sores with soothing pink calamine lotion. I don’t know the ingredients of that stuff, but it worked.
I didn’t mind missing school, but with light-sensitive eyes, I couldn’t read for long stretches. I listened to Arthur Godfrey and Our Gal Sunday on the radio and thought about my classmates cavorting at recess on the school playground in town.
