American Experience

Narrator: The summer of 1950 started like most summers in the small town of Wytheville, Virginia. School let out, the town pools opened, and kids flocked to the soda fountain on Main Street. Almost 40 percent of the town’s 5,500 residents were under the age of 18.

John Johnson: Wytheville was more or less a lazy type, laid back town. Everyone knew everyone. It got really hot in the summertime. And we would go swimming. We were happy go lucky kids.

Eleanor Sage: I had a pair of my grandfather’s rubber boots on and I was wadin’ in the creek. And when I went to get out I felt like something pulled in my leg. I went home and hadn’t been home too long till I started runnin’ a temperature and was real nauseous and just kept goin’ higher and higher.

Betty Cook Brown: I was outside playing, I just didn’t feel right. By the time I got inside the house to my mother, I told her I was sick. I had a headache. I was so dizzy. And after that, I just passed out.

Anne B. Crockett-Stark: The doctor came to do a spinal tap on my brother, and he screamed. And my mother ran downstairs with a bed pillow, went out in the back yard and covered her head with a pillow, and laid there and screamed.

Eugene Warren: We only had two ambulance services in Wytheville. One would come in to the clinic with a suspected case while the other one would be coming out of the clinic and leaving for either Roanoke or Richmond in, out, in, out, in, out, in, out. Mr. Williams’ tote board was right across the street from where I worked and it was always visible, and every once in a while we’d go to the front door and look out and then every time another one came in with diagnosis, well, they changed the count.