I was chatting via e-mail with a friend of mine today, and he said that his mom wanted to see a “polio doctor”. Now, to be honest, she’s a little crazy, so I made some off-hand joke about it.

Turns out she had polio when she was a kid. Who knew? I realized that my parents had to deal with polio, but I thought they came around about the time the vaccine was developed. I was wrong, and luckily my friend wasn’t offended.

When I was growing up my Dad has told the story of “Cousin Jim” who had polio. What made him different was that it was the virus from his blood that Salk used to develop the vaccine. Apparently it was such a big deal that it put the little hamlet of Daisytown, Pennsylvania on the map.

I remembered seeing some newspaper clippings that he has, but in this new age of the Internets I thought I’d check out Google.

Searching on “Daisytown Salk” the first hit was a nice article on cousin Jim. We are supposed to go to Pennsylvania for a wedding this summer, so maybe I’ll stop by and see him.