Wood, Wicker, and the Ghost of FDR
Growing up by getting well
BY SUSAN SHREVE
I got polio when I was a year old living
in Toledo, Ohio, during an epidemic that spread throughout
the Midwest. For American parents in the 1940s and
early '50s, the polio virus was a constant fear.
I was left without the use of my right leg and with
a weakness on my right side. When I didn't walk
with crutches, I used my bad leg as a peg, swinging
it to move forward. That life was the only one I knew,
and although it didn't upset me, the occasional
ridicule of other children did. I longed to be normal.
Between 1950 and 1952 I lived off and on in a spa
hotel turned hospital in Warm Springs, Ga. I arrived
at the age of 11 on a soft, sunny morning in June,
having traveled south in our Chevrolet with my brother
in the back seat, my parents riding up front, listening
to songs of love and loss on the radio with the volume
turned up to drown out our arguments. It was my first
time away from home. We had passed through the small
village about two hours from Atlanta named for its
mineral springs, and approached the setting of the
former Meriwether Inn.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt had purchased the
Meriwether in the late 1920s, after he contracted
polio. He transferred its ownership to a nonprofit
corporation and had the former Victorian resort, with
its warm water pools, converted to a rehabilitation
hospital for victims of polio, primarily children.
He also made it his occasional home. The inn was replaced
in the '30s by Georgia Hall, built in the style
of a southern plantation with porticos and columns
forming one side of a quadrangle, painted white and
blinding in the sun. By the time I arrived, the buildings
had what I remember as a faded elegance, with peeling
paint, worn columns, grass sprouting through the cracks
of walkways, and the heavily perfumed summer air of
the lush South: a sepia sense of time suspended, and
of ghosts.
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