.Polio and Trust: County Road B2 962

 Polio Across the Alley 

Buddy Himes' mother caught polio. I was aware of how much adults feared that we kids would suffer polio. I remember scenes on television from the Sister Kenney Institute in Minneapolis. They showed victims confined to "iron lungs" and others trying to learn to walk again at. I remember the summer we were forbidden to run through lawn sprinklers because that might give us polio. Yet, the disease remained a distant abstraction for me until Buddy's mom came home. 

Her arms and legs were paralyzed, but she was kind and welcoming as ever. Each time I ran into the house with Buddy she was in the kitchen smiling and sitting in a chair that was more contraption than chair. It had wheels; cables went from metal frames above her to her wrists. She was still practicing ways to make her pencil-thin arms and hands useful. Buddy seemed accustomed to his mother's predicament. I never got comfortable during my moments in her presence. However, I did not have long before they moved from their house across the alley. They moved to a brand new home at County Road B2 962.

Trust: County Road B2, 962

You may wonder why I remember County Road B2 962, the new address of Buddy Himes, my friend from across the alley who moved away when I was seven. I wonder why I remember why. I do not remember the address of any of my other friends, nor do I know what was Buddy's address when he lived across the alley. More accurately, I wonder "at” how I remember Buddy's new address. 

I had been to the new house shortly before they moved in. I was there with my Dad when he helped Buddy's dad and others shingle the roof. The home was of the style that I came to recognize as post-World-War-Two. These houses are tiny, have a simple gable roof, and the gable-ends have virtually no overhang to keep the rainwater from flowing back into the house. I don't know how much money it saved to build a roof without eaves on the ends. While this eaveless style soon disappeared from new home construction, eaveless gable homes survive well across the country in suburbs of the late 1940s and early 1950s. 

Back to the “why-do-I-remember” story. 

I was seven years old when the Himes family moved away in 1950. Buddy had been my principal playmate--our back yards separated by only a narrow alley. I wanted a chance to play with him at his new home. My parents, especially my dad, thought me quite capable of making the visit. If I remember correctly, the trip required a ride on the Hamline Cherokee streetcar eastward from near my house, a transfer to a streetcar northward on Dale street, a wait at a strange corner, and a second transfer onto a Bus (possibly my first-ever bus ride) that would wind back west then northward a short distance beyond Highway 36. After getting off at County Road B2 beyond what seemed like city to me, I need only walk a third of a mile.

As a crow could fly the distance was perhaps five miles, but I saw it as quite a challenging journey. My parents were confident I could make it there and back if I memorized the address. Whether motivated more by worries or by my parents' trust, I memorized well. I made the journey, had fun playing with Buddy on the still-barren lot, and returned home carrying the pride-in-competence I had earned that day. 

As far as I know, that day was the last contact between the Himes and Komives families.

 

Sixty years later, alone in my car during a visit to St. Paul,  I realized I was not far from County Road B2, 962. And there it is, a still-small home behind mature trees and well-kept lawn. 

I lingered but a minute--only to marvel at the longevity in both well-memorized memory and in the gift of parental trust.








(c) from date of posting, by Bob Komives, Fort Collins