Why vaccinate?

I spent a lot of time playing with paper dolls while stuck in bed recovering from diseases that are no longer affecting (vaccinated) children.  

As soon as various vaccines were available, my parents made sure that we got them, because they knew people who were affected or died from the 'childhood ' diseases. (I remember playing with my cousins while I had measles because the theory was if you could get your child a mild case of measles , they'd be protected against most of the worst outcomes. That vaccination because available for me to make sure my children got vaccinated.  

Polio -- we were forbidden to gather in groups. Forbidden to go to the public swimming pool, all because those were areas where you could catch polio which is a horrible disease. death or life in a metal 'lung' machine and/ or deformity because it damaged bone growth, muscle growth, an lungs. As soon as that vaccine was available, my parents made sure we all got the vaccine.  

We also still have the scar on our arm or leg where we were vaccinated against the deadly smallpox. Was horrified when the dr. wouldn't vaccinate my children for smallpox. That's when the World Health Assembly declared smallpox eradicated in 1980.  

(small portions of it are kept in various country's secret vaults, in case they want to use it as a weapon against another country.) 

Collecting Seashells

I grew up in a family that always collected Sea Shells. 

When we lived in Pennsylvania, we'd drive to the Jersey Shore every few weeks in the summer. On the weekend. Along with thousands of others.  Getting there was a clear shot, but coming home was a traffic jam as all the day trippers (us) and the people who had rented for a week were all driving back home. So, the two hour drive to get there was a three or four hour drive home - two parents and four children. (We lived in Pottstown, just outside of Philadelphia. at that time.)

Side note- When my brother Don was a preschooler, he would wander the shore. Mom could always find him because he wore the tiniest bathing suit there.  Also he kept asking girls and ladies to marry him.  One year we stayed a week across the street from Grace Kelly's family's house in Stone Harbor, NJ. (you know - the one who married the prince of Monaco.) Yes, he asked her to marry him, too. The year she married the prince, my father teased my brother that he should sue for breach of promise. :) 

At that time, the Jersey shore at Ocean City, New Jersey always had large (5 inch or more) clam shells on the beach.  (The other interesting shore thing was the sand crabs we could dig up and let crawl on our hands. Or go beach walking at night and see thousands of them up on the beach crawling around.) Yes, there were also Sand Pipers that we kids would chase and make fly away.

My dad would use these large clam shells as ash trays at home - he smoked Chesterfield cigarettes and no he didn't die of lung cancer - he died after having a heart attack.

Those were the only shells we found in those days at the Jersey shore.  But later, when my parents moved to Florida and I brought my own children there to swim in the bathtub warm water, we found lots of different shells which we collected.  

And now that I live near southern California beaches, I've collected more.  Yes, I still do have one of dad's ashtray clam shells, plus the Florida shells, and here in California I collect beautiful scallop shells plus sand dollars and some other odd ones.  I have them on display on my (gas) fireplace mantle.

Why did my father insist we swim in the ocean instead of the local city pool?  Because in that time Polio was rampant and one of the places people thought you could catch it was in the crowded public pools - so he'd rather protect us by taking that long drive to the shore.  No, I do not remember how our family fit in the car, especially considering the bassinet for baby Marion took up so much space.

 

Life in the 1950s

Usually our evening meal was meat and potatoes and a vegetable. Sometimes a salad. Dessert was canned fruit and two cookies. Also - we were skinny/ thin. Very few children were fat. We went outside to play and told we could stay out until the streetlights came on. (or we got too cold in the wintertime and wanted to come in to warm up.)  We were thin, but strong because of all this activity. 

We did have ONE TV, but we watched what the parents wanted to watch or what they allowed us to watch. (cartoons on Saturday mornings, of course) 

We all took a bag lunch to school in elementary school. No cafeteria for us - we ate in our classroom. No school cafeteria, no school library, no auditorium. We listened to adventure stories on the radio. And variety shows. The car didn't have a radio. When we went on a car trip, we packed lunch and/or snacks and ate while we were riding in it. (sometimes we read comic books on long trips, ignoring our parent's warnings that reading in the car would ruin our eyes. Because of the bumpiness of the ride.)

As soon as any vaccine was available, my mother made sure we got it.  I still have my smallpox vaccine scar.  We got the first polio vaccines. (for many years everyone collected dimes to donate toward that research.  Dimes because our president in the 1940s, Franklin D. Roosevelt had had polio and the scientific community was determined to eliminate it.