In Dunmore students' interviews, polio survivors recount fear, lifelong battles

Oct. 13—DUNMORE — It was a Friday in September 1953. Six-year-old Fred Garvey came home from first grade at Holy Rosary School with a wicked headache.

That night, delirium set in as his fever soared. A doctor came to his house and took a blood sample. On Monday, the ambulance arrived. Medics strapped the boy to a gurney and took him away. Police held his mother back as he cried out for her.

A blood test revealed he had polio, a contagious virus that infects the spinal cord.

Authorities placed quarantine signs in the front yard of the family's North Scranton home. People crossed the street instead of walking too close.

Garvey spent that fall isolated from his family, nearing death and then recovering at the West Mountain Sanitarium in Scranton. He could hear the hum of iron lungs that kept some polio patients alive. When the 6-year-old could finally see his family, he had to do so from behind a window.

Garvey, a retired Dunmore English and geography teacher, came back to the school on Friday. About two dozen students working on a polio documentary project interviewed Garvey and others. For the last month, most of the senior class researched the disease now eliminated in most of the world thanks to vaccines.

"It's hard to get hands-on with history," said Alan Roche, who teaches a modern history course. "It's one thing to read from the textbook ... it's another thing to talk to people about it."

This documentary is being produced as part of World Polio Day on Oct. 24. Members of the Rotary Club of Scranton, on hand for the interviews on Friday, plan a series of educational activities for World Polio Day at the Geisinger Commonwealth School of Medicine.

Roche received a $1,000 grant from the Global Development Project Fund, a program of the United Nations Association of Northeastern Pennsylvania, to purchase equipment to produce the documentary and other news programs. Roche and the students are participating in the PBS Student Report Labs Storymaker Project, a national project that instructs young people on the best principles and practices of responsible journalism.

Rotary International has helped lead the effort to eradicate polio since 1985 and, in 1988, helped establish the Global Polio Eradication Initiative. Polio cases have decreased by more than 99% since in 1988, with a type of the virus remaining in Pakistan and Afghanistan, according to the World Health Organization. Polio vaccines began to be administered in 1955, two years after Garvey's diagnosis.

Senior Jackson Madajeski sat in a conference room on Friday, interviewing Garvey.

Garvey, now 76, recalled how a local doctor told his family he'd never walk again and recommended he spend his childhood as a ward of the state, living at a hospital. Garvey's parents pushed back, finding a doctor in the Lehigh Valley who outfitted their son in iron leg braces and crutches.

He repeated first grade, with some parents pulling their children from his classroom because of his polio diagnosis the year before. His mother insisted he receive no special treatment, making him walk the seven to eight blocks to school. He became stronger, both mentally and physically, participating in — and winning — weightlifting competitions.

"I always wanted to be better at things ... and I think that's because of the polio," said Garvey, who still must wear a leg brace.

Students also interviewed Garvey's older brother, Joseph Garvey, who was only 7 at his brother's diagnosis and had to quarantine with his parents and younger siblings for a month, while they worried about the 6-year-old.

"I don't think people realize today how difficult it was in those particular years," Joseph Garvey said.

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