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MARCH 26 — 1953 Salk cures polio virus; 1920 F. Scott Fitzgerald publishes first novel; 1776 Rutledge becomes president of South Carolina; 1937 DiMaggio upgrades his baseball bat
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MARCH 26
1953-Polio gets its cure.
Thank you Dr. Jonas Salk! Consider how important that was. In the 1950’s Americans feared two things: the atom bomb, and polio. In 1952 there were 58000 cases reported in the US; thousands died and many more thousands were left semi- or completely paralyzed. Take FDR into consideration, for instance. After all, he’s lucky he bounced back from that at all. That’s probably a big reason as to why he founded the National foundation for Infantile Paralysis, known today as the March of Dimes Foundation, when he was President of the US.
But getting back to Salk. Jonas Salk was born in 1914 and grew up in the Jewish immigrant culture of New York. He studied at New York University and began research in the 1930s. He married Donna Linsday under that was contingent on her father’s two conditions: 1) Get your MD first, and 2) Get a middle name. During WWII he helped develop flu vaccines, then he ran a research lab at the University of Pittsburgh in 1947. A year later he was awarded a grant to study the polio and come up with a vaccine, and by 1950 he has his prototype, albeit unsuccessful.
The procedure was to kill several strains of the virus and then inject the benign viruses into a healthy person’s bloodstream. The person’s immune system would then create antibodies designed to resist future exposure to the disease. He tried the procedure on former polio patients, then himself and his family, then the day came on March 26 of 1953 when he made the big announcement, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
And just like that, he became a hero overnight. By 1954 clinical trials using the Salk vaccine and a placebo began on almost 2 million American children, and in April 1955, it was announced a safe and effective vaccine, literally, the day after President Roosevelt died.
. These days we only have a handful of polio problems and they pretty much all come from folks who bring it from third world countries. My man Jonas Salk was awarded, among other honors, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977. He came up with the Salk Institute in beautiful La Jolla, CA, and was named the “Father of Biophilosphy” by the New York Times. In 1968 Jonas and Donna got divorced and he got remarried to Francoise Gilot, the former mistress of Pablo Picasso. He died at the age of 80 and is buried at El Camino Memorial Park in San Diego. So send flowers.
1920-F Scott Fitzgerald publishes his first novel, This Side of Paradise.
Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota to a very well-to-do family in 1896, who named him after the writer of the Star Spangled Banner, Francis Scott Key. So really, his name was Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald. When you look at his life, it becomes apparent that the Great Gatsby might as well have been his autobiography, which is a whole nother story, literally, that I’ll have to get into at another time.
The title for This Side of Paradise was taken from the Rupert Brooke poem Tiare Tahiti, which examines the lives and morality of post-WWI youth. Its protagonist, Amory Bllain, is an attractive Princeton University student who dabbles in literature. It’s about love, warped by greed and status-seeking. Sadly, F Scott Fitzgerald died young at the age of 44 in Hollywood.
1776 – South Carolina approves a new constitution and was renamed the General Assembly of South Carolina with John Rutledge as president. This was four months before the continental Congress declared independence from Great Britain, and fi ve months before South Carolina even knew there was a declaration.
1937 – Joe DiMaggio takes the advise of ty Cobb and replaced his 40 oz bat with a 36 oz.
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