![]() He didn't have to go into the iron lung."īoth Charlie Lynn, now a Union Pacific Railroad manager, and Rowe, who is a part-time child-care provider, recovered with few visible effects from the virus. "Charlie could breathe on his own, though his body was very rigid. "But we were one of the lucky ones," Lynn added. Charlie spent months recuperating there and did not return to school until 1950.īeing told her child had polio "was a very, very dreaded feeling," Lynn said. The Lynns took their only child, who was 6 at the time, to Methodist Hospital - now Parkview Hospital - in Fort Wayne. "He tried to sit Charlie up in bed, but his neck and back were stiff." ![]() "The doctor came out to the house," Lynn recalled of the summer of 1949. She recalls her son Charlie's battle with the virus, which nationwide caused thousands of deaths or permanent paralysis. Memories of the polio epidemic also come easily for 80-year-old Anna Mae Lynn of Huntington. My teeth were clenched so tight they could barely get a straw between my teeth to give me fluids," Rowe, now 54, recalled. "My parents told me that my jaws were locked and my organs began to be paralyzed. She was not hospitalized, but the doctor visited her daily, she said. The contagious virus mainly affected Rowe's right side, then insidiously spread throughout her body, even affecting internal organs. I remember being carried around by my dad." "My brother and my sister were not allowed to really spend time with me. "I remember just lying there in bed," Rowe said. Fred Schoen, gave the Fort Wayne family the news every parent at that time dreaded: Rowe had polio. ![]() It wasn't long before her family physician, Dr. Sue Rowe was just a second-grader at Washington Township Elementary School on Wallen Road that fall in 1952 when extreme lethargy and flulike symptoms set in.
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