Deadly Secrets.

FRIDAY, JULY 2, 2010


Deadly Secrets.

Yesterday and last nite I was thinking about Rosie, my mom. Back in the days before Salk or Sabin there was a deadly secret that was not so secret. Polio was all around us. Even presidents were not immune. Neither was Rosie.

I was very young. I may have some of these early facts a little confused because back then I was pretty wrapped up in my own little world. A biggest part of that was how fat my mother was getting. She was never thin but this came upon her quickly. Rosie was pregnant.

My brother and I were going into the first and second grades after the summer. Mike was older and knew how to print and read. I was pretty much oblivious to any real schooling because my first experience with the nuns was about playing together nicely, drinking chocolate milk and taking naps in the auditorium of St. Phillip Neri. The real struggle of education had yet to begin for me. Joanne was still a toddling baby.

We had just moved into a new house that Hermie had Mr. Pogmore build on a hill overlooking Centerport Harbor. Dad had bought the lot fairly cheaply because it was on the side of a steep hill. We had great fun as Mr. Pogmore had his bulldozers carve out two terraces. The top one was for the front yard and the bottom one was for the foundation of the house that was built into the hill. The top terrace was supposed to include a driveway to the garage there. Dad did all the landscaping.

It was a great house that dad helped design. He made many changes to the plan that Mr. Pogmore was not that happy to oblige him in. The top terrace ended up as just a front yard because it was not wide enough for the car to turn and get into the garage. Little things like that kept popping up. Some took years to correct. Some we learned to live with.

I hardly remember moving into the house because Mike and I were shuttled off to stay with my aunt and uncle in Connecticut. Jo went to stay with Gram Potter, mom’s mom. Mom went to the hospital to have the baby.

We did not understand then but Aunt Gladys was a kind and loving sister to my dad. Uncle Ray was the kind of uncle every kid would want for their uncle or even their dad. Uncle Ray, always with a chuckle and a smile, had a huge bald head. Aunt Gladys had a huge full head of jet black hair. She fed us peanut butter or cream cheese and grape or strawberry jam sandwiches, as many as we could keep down. Gladys liked jam because it had fruit in it. Jelly was not highly regarded. I like the strawberry jam better because I still detest grape skins. Someone ought to take the trouble to peel grapes. Not me.

Our cousin Raymond kept us in Dutch because we didn’t want him hanging around with us. He was too young. His revenge for being ignored and ostracized was eating our crayons… almost an entire cigar box full of them and a couple of oversized boxes. He even ate my silver and blue green, my favorites, out of spite.

Aunt Gladys, like Dad was raised not to spare the rod. She didn’t. I thought Raymond should get the spanking for being too dumb to eat PJ&B like normal kids. He preferred Crayolas and because of that it was Mike and me that got the thrashing for leaving our crayons where he could eat them. He either really liked crayons because he did ate them more than once.

We were breezing through the summer not really knowing or too much concerned about what was going on back across the Whitestone Bridge on the north shore of Long Island. I remember after a while Herm came up to Norwalk. He and Aunt Gladys were sitting at the kitchen table crying. I had never seen my dad cry before and never have since. Gladys said: “Herm, pull it together for the boys.” I was confused that Rosie was not with Herm.

The last time I saw mommy she was smiling and happy, headed off to the hospital to bring us home a present. Instead of that we were in Norwalk and dad was at the kitchen table crying.

That day I found out that the baby had died. Mommy was very very sick and still in the hospital. This was the hidden secret we were being protected from.

Mom had polio. We had no idea what that was except that it was awful. Mommy was in an Iron Lung back on Long Island and we could not see her. The reasoning seemed really stupid at the time. Mike and I were not old enough to go into a hospital ward. We cried to see her perpetually smiling face. I was crushed.

It ended up a long summer. We picked wild blueberries and raspberries and ate them on Wheaties. Dad’s favorite cereal was Wheaties. He ate a lot of Cheerios but we were sure he liked Wheaties best. I know I sure did.

We stayed out until it was dark chasing and catching fireflies in jars hoping they would make a good lanterns on the dresser. We found baby bunnies and chased their parents across the large yards. We played soldier and I chipped Mike’s front teeth with the butt of the Daisy air rifle when he charged my fort. Mike also got hit in the head with a swing when he tried to retrieve a girl’s ring she threw on the ground to see who would be brave or stupid enough to try to evade the pendulum as she kicked for the sky. Mike got bitten by one of the boxer dogs that lived a couple of houses higher on the hill in the development. Mike was a little accident prone.

I just kept getting fatter and fatter eating all of the Philadelphia cream cheese with Welches jam on Wonderbread with those disgusting grape skins I had to remove from every sandwich. Ice cream bars for desert and what ever else I could scrounge when no one was looking. Mike had an incident with Gladys when he smart assed her when she wouldn’t let him have an ice cream bar. He told Gladys she wanted to save it for herself. She came after him and I think it was the screen door slamming on her hand that caused a hospital visit that afternoon and the subsequent beating later.

Dad came back to retrieve us near the end of the summer. None of my questions about mom were answered. I was too naïve to know when someone was dodging an issue or changing the subject. Aunt Gladys filled paper lunch sacks with wax paper sandwich bags stuffed with PB&J sandwiches. The sandwiches were eaten before we hit the bridge across the sound.

We had to go back to the nuns for more education.

I don’t remember lots of things about arriving home. We got there in the big black 1954 Chrysler Windsor. We could see really far from the Whitestone Bridge. The water was a heck of a long ways down. The Windsor’s steering wheel was about the size of a Ferris wheel. It was light grey plastic with a pretty Chrysler logo under the huge plastic domed horn button. Inside and outside of the car there was lots of chrome. The overstuffed seats were covered in tuck and roll grey fabric.

When we pulled down the hill and parked, my first memory of Rosie was right outside the front door at Washington Drive. I blurted out: “You look so skinny.” She really was. I didn’t know what she said to me but she hugged me with all her strength. She did not have enough left to even open the door to go inside.

Mom couldn’t do much of anything after spending the summer in the Iron Lung. She could barely stand. I became mother’s little helper. I used to pull down the latch handle to the Kelvinator to help her make dinner. Dad had his own canvas business. We ate as soon as he got home from work. We ate a lot of chicken as in chicken backs and dumplings; lots of dumplings, not so much chicken.

Our young Irish Doctor O’Brien arranged for home physical therapy. Dad installed pulleys and ropes with weights in the doorway to the kitchen. I helped change the weights and even helped raise the weights into the air until Rosie could finally pull the handles far enough to hoist the weights all by herself. Eventually she could open the refrigerator without my help. Finally she could open the cupboard, remove the one quart pot, fill it with water from the sink and put it on the stovetop to boil our Bird’s Eye vegetables.

Since she could not talk very well Rosie also had a speech therapist. I learned to read while mom learned to read aloud. We had Fun with Dick and Jane. It always made me smile because Jane was my mom’s mother. Jane did this and Jane did that. I was instructed how to make my mother repeat every word she mispronounced several times even after she got it right. She was happy she was helping teach me read. I was proud I was helping teach her to talk.

Doctor O’Brien, the physical and speech therapists made regular visits to our house to gauge progress and make changes as required. Mom slowly recovered and the frequency of the home visits decreased. I worshipped our doctor and wanted to be just like him.

Mom and Doctor O’Brien made sure we all had our Salk polio vaccine. We went to his house and got our shots there in his office. Joanne managed almost ten frenzied laps through the examination and waiting rooms before Mike and I managed to tackle her and Doctor O’Brien slammed home the needle into that tiny screaming phenom. Although Jo was too young to remember I am not so sure she will ever forgive me for my part in that.

Mom ended up making a startling and complete recovery from the polio. Unless you knew she had suffered so much you could never guess. Mom’s physical health was fine. She did have several bouts with depression through the years. Baby Lawrence came to soothe her when they were at their worst.


We left our friends and family and moved to Florida for a new beginning after dad closed his business. I had to break up with Nancy Wright. I was not a happy camper. We left the old Windsor parked behind Grandpa’s shop full of cement hoes and yard tools never to be seen again. We took the Silver Meteor to Florida.


Dad had a serious bout with cancer and then mom had her turn. Mom’s went into Holy Cross Hospital for a biopsy and came out of the operating room with a radical double. For a long while there were no additional signs. As far as we knew she was in remission.


We went on with our adult lives and dad died. It was not easy for him or us.

Mom went to Atlanta to visit her brother Jim and his wife Muriel. They often took Rosie on little trips. It was a kindness we can never repay. On her last trip to Atlanta she fell down at the bottom of the stairs. The EMT’s rushed her to the hospital where she stayed in the ICU. It was very serious and no one seemed to know what would happen or what to do. The lady doctor recommended we put mom in a Hospice to live out her last days. She had mom on a respirator. That plastic tube down mom’s throat did not make it easy to communicate. We finally worked out a code of eye blinks. If I was clairvoyant enough I could ask the right questions. One of the answers was that mom was not ready to die. She most certainly did not want to be in a bed in a Hospice doing it.

Her lady doctor was surprised about the polio and said that explained why Rose had so much trouble breathing. Her diaphragm was still partially paralyzed. This was as much a secret to us as it must have been to Doctor O’Brien and all of her doctors that treated mom after we moved to Florida from New York. I don’t remember mom being a big fan of doctors but surely someone should have noticed she was not operating on all of her cylinders.
The family arranged for mom to fly with Margaret down to Fort Lauderdale on an Air Taxi. Margaret and my youngest sister Rita were the result of mom being a card carrying catholic and following her husband’s wishes. It did not hurt that Father Sali explained to mom how she would burn in hell if she did not have more children. The entire family is glad for mom’s compliant nature, especially Marg and Rita.

Before mom was rolled on to the plane the lady doctor did not give a very good prognosis of what might happen when it landed in Florida. The flight might even kill her. She was not very encouraging with me when we discussed the idea.

Mom was hopeful because she would be going home. Her saints and the Holy Mother could look over her in Holy Cross. To complicate things Holy Cross did not have a bed for her when she arrived. Mom spent some time ‘resting comfortably’ in the hall. Five days later she was shuffling down the hallways saying her special thanks to St. Jude Thaddeus. This patron saint of hopeless caused has pulled our collective asses from the fire on more than one occasion.

Mom hung in there for quite a bit longer than her doctor had predicted. She still was operating on only one lung and never ran any wind sprints up and down South East 11th Street. Her church was just around the corner barely a block and a half from the house. My brother moved in next door to drive Rosie to church and to make sure that no one would ever have to ask her whether she wanted to spend her last days in a Hospice.

Rose and I never kept any secrets from each other. She had told me that she wanted to die when she lost the baby. She thought the polio was God’s punishment for having those thoughts. She told me her father (who she was not on speaking terms with at the time) came to visit her when she was in the Iron Lung. Lawrence told her she was a Potter. She needed to get over losing the baby. She also needed to heal herself and get out of that Iron Lung because she had three children at home who really needed their mother to be well.


We were well when our mother was there. She always made sure of that.
© 07.02.2010 steven d philbrick SR+ DakotaDawg


POSTED BY SRPLUS AT 12:47 PM