I went to kindergarten at the University of Colorado! At the time there were few kindergartens anywhere, either in public or private schools. It was a concept that originated in Germany, hence the name, "kinder" meaning "children" and "garten", "garden". My mother had been a teacher and was very much interested in education.

She found out about an experimental program in the education department at CU. It was quite a distance from where we lived in Boulder up to "UniHill" as they called it. She made a deal with a public bus driver to look after me on the bus. She walked me to the bus and the teacher met the bus when I got off and vice versa. This was a big deal for a 5 year-old. I loved it! It was a huge adventure for me.

Classroom education is only a tiny fraction of what each one of us learns in life.

My dad was an animal lover to the max. We always had dogs and cats. He had a pet owl in the barn. Once he brought home a terrapin, a land turtle, about a foot in diameter. It was in the road and he was afraid it would be run over. He fed it raw hamburger and it stayed around. Feed any animal one time and it stays!

My dad told the story of once when he and my mother were first married he was out on snowshoes tramping around in the Rocky Mountains. Why, I don't know. He came around an outcropping of rock, face to face with a mountain lion. He took off in one direction and the lion took off in the other. I'm sure that wasn't easy on snowshoes! (My mother wasn't fond of that story.)

When I was little, from preschool through elementary school, we lived on the outskirts of Boulder on seventeen acres abutting the foothills of the mountains. I had an older sister and a younger sister. My brother, R.G., was 9 years older than me and was my hero. When he was in high school he and a buddy tramped around out in the mountains all the time. They caught and killed rattlesnakes and brought them home in a gunnysack. No guns. My dad had guns but wouldn't let R.G. use them.

R.G. and his friend skinned the rattlesnakes and nailed the skins to the side of the barn to cure. Rattlesnake skins were and are very popular for Western belts and such. Even boots. My mother had a hissie-fit at first but my dad said it was OK because R.G. knew what he was doing. Mother was overruled. So she got out books with pictures of all kinds of snakes and taught us, my sisters and me, the difference between poisonous ones and harmless ones. A pointy-head denoted the venomous ones, a rounded head, harmless.

Anyway, R.G. and his buddy sold those rattlesnake skins and with the money he bought a horse. She, "Dottie", was a sorry swaybacked old nag with a nasty disposition but R.G. loved her and he was the only one who could control her. He taught me to ride her around the yard. She knew better than to buck me off if R.G. were in her view. If she and I got out of R.G.'s sight though, she would just sit down on her haunches and I would slide off the back. She then headed for the foothills.

Once when I had a birthday party, R.G. took all my little guests for a ride around the yard, leading Dottie by the reins. That made R.G. an even bigger hero in my eyes and my birthday party was the talk of the town!

R.G. had a beautiful singing voice. He sang the leading roles in productions while he was in high school. He also played the guitar. A couple of summers he had a job at a "Dude Ranch" at Gold Hill. He was a guide, taking the guests out on horseback tours of the mountain trails. At night he would entertain the guests by singing and playing the guitar around the fire. I well remember hearing him play and sing the "Streets of Laredo" at home.

These are the lyrics:

"As I walked out in the streets of Laredo,

As I walked out in Laredo one day,

I spied a young cowboy all wrapped in white linen.

All wrapped in white linen and cold as the clay.

'I see by your outfit that you are a cowboy.'

These words he did say, as I boldly stepped by.

"Come sit here beside me and hear my sad story,

For I'm shot in the heart and I surely will die.'

'Well, sir, once in the saddle, I used to go dashing.

Yes, sir, once in the saddle I was a young brave.

But today I got dressed up. Today I went gambling.

And today I will die and be laid in my grave.

So send six sturdy cowboys to carry my coffin,

And let six lovely ladies come sing me a song.

And beat the drum slowly. And play the fife lowly.

For I'm a young cowboy what knows he done wrong.

My friend, could you get me a taste of cool water?

For my lips they are parched and I'm terrible dry.'

But before I could fetch him that dipper of water,

His spirit departed. That cowboy, he died.

So we beat the drum slowly and played the fife lowly.

And we wept in our grief, as we carried him along.

For we all loved that cowboy, so brave and so handsome.

Yes, we loved that young cowboy, although he done wrong."

R.G. also had a pair of tame white rats in a cage. Pretty soon there were LOTS of little hairless pink baby rats! It was a dandy sex education for us little kids. Occasionally he carried them around in his shirt and took them out to let them run around. They were his pets. He let me gently pet them and play with them.

One day when I was out playing in the barn by myself I caught a little brown mouse. He bit me on the hand. It didn't hurt much but I casually told my mother about it. She had a hissie-fit. Off to the doctor for a shot that was probably tetanus. A bewildering situation for a little girl. I thought the mouse was cute!

What did I learn? Mother was prone to hissie-fits! So I didn't always tell her things that might provoke one. That could have been to my peril, but lucky for me it didn't turn out that way.

When I was taking lab courses in college working with white rats - no problem for me. Most of the girls had hissie-fits and some of the boys were skittish at the idea of messing with rats. I knew the difference between tame white rats bred for laboratories and wild brown ones that carried disease. I still think rats are cute, white or brown. Take their tails away and they are not much different from hamsters. Cute and cuddly little pets.

My elementary years in public school were pretty uneventful as I loved school and I think I had good teachers as I remember. Also I did have to walk to school, probably about a mile, which was no big deal except when it was very cold in winter. I was afraid of the wind; that it would blow me down. (Naturally it was uphill both ways!) There were plenty of other kids to walk with and we had fun doing stuff kids do on the way to and from school.

My only negative memory of that time was being chased by a bully several years older than I was. We kids were walking home from school and the boy found a nest of baby snakes. He hollered out what he had found. I went over to see. He wiggled one in his hand in front of my face. I took off running and he chased me, putting the snake down the back of my coat. He must have thought all girls were afraid of snakes and he was showing off. I don't know what he was thinking. All I remember was feeling that thing wriggling at the nape of my neck. I had no way of knowing whether it was a rattler and didn't have time to find out. It was probably a garter snake, but did that boy know the difference?

You can bet my parents took up the matter with his parents. He never bothered me again but I gave him a wide berth from then on!

Many years later my husband and I found ourselves living in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains in California. We had seven-year-old twin boys and a baby boy. Guess what? We had rattlesnakes. They turned up in the yard and garage from time to time. Fortunately they do hibernate in winter. Imagine the hissi-fits I threw! Out came the picture books of reptiles and lessons on snake differentiation.

Dogs in the neighborhood were bitten on the nose from sniffing around the snakes. We had a calico cat named Minou (French for cat). She had an ingenious way of alerting us whenever there was a snake around. She would stalk it in a wide circle. Intuitively she knew the size of the snake and it's striking distance. A snake can strike the distance of its length. Her circle was just beyond that reach. To my knowledge she never killed one, just warned us about it.

My husband growled but got a shovel and killed the snakes. Our boys witnessed the hissi-fits and growling of course and learned all about crawly critters. Just in case, we bought a "Snake Bite Kit" with a little tourniquet, a small scalpel to cut an "X" over the fang marks and a suction cup to draw out the venom, a wee vial of iodine, band-aids and an instruction sheet. That was for first aid, before we took off for the emergency room. We were ready! We never had to use it except.......

Sometime later it looked as if my husband was going to be transferred and we would have to move. We put the house on the market. Then it turned out he was going to stay put so we didn't have to move. For the duration of the real estate listing I left the "Snake Bite Kit" (clearly marked) discretely on the kitchen counter whenever there was a showing. We did not receive any offers! I know, I know, I was sabotaging a legal contract, but I can admit it now because the statute of limitations has run out.

While I was still a little kid in the second grade, one time we were visiting an uncle and aunt who had a player piano. My uncle showed me how to put the paper rolls of music in the slots over the keyboard and then pump the foot pedals to make it go. As the music played, the keys on the piano went up and down as if a ghost were playing. I was utterly fascinated by it and for weeks couldn't stop talking about it.

My parents invested in an old upright piano and my two sisters and I began music lessons. They impressed upon us that the piano and lessons were expensive so we were obliged to practice faithfully. We did. It wasn't too hard to get me to practice, however, because I loved the music and it was fun playing.

As a result, I advanced to the head of my teacher's roster of pupils and the foot of her recital program. Periodically, she held a recital for all the parents, families and friends to come hear how accomplished we students had become. At my first recital there were several of my little friends ahead of me on the program. One of them messed up badly and fled the stage in tears. I was horrified! I had my first in a long line of experiences with stage fright. Somehow I managed to get through my little piece without incident. But I vowed from then on to know my piece so well that nothing could rattle me. That meant diligent practice!

I think my parents probably thought my dedication to the piano was because I loved music, which of course, I did and still do. But my primary purpose was to prepare for the next recital coming up. I did enjoy the applause and the obvious pride and approval of my family and friends but that was far from the principal motivation. Backstage before each performance I suffered the agonies of the damned with freezing fingers.

The music lessons I took both privately and in college were mostly about piano music and the nuts and bolts of music. In the process, though, I learned a lot more than notes and rhythm. For one thing, there is plenty of mathematics in music. That spilled over into my courses in math in school. Show me a kid who has taken music lessons and I'll show you "A" on the report cards all the way through Algebra, Geometry and beyond.

Eye-hand coordination? Essential for successful piano playing but also for baseball! Learning to type is a snap for anyone who has ever played the piano. Finger dexterity works for both. With practice, I have learned to "play" the computer keyboard as fast as I play the piano. I can type almost as fast as I can think. Although at times I unconsciously "play" all the letters of a short word as I would chords on the piano. The typewriter or computer doesn't like that. Naturally I make mistakes, but on the computer, I can go back and correct them. Can't do that in performing a piano composition.

Speaking of mistakes, one of the merits and most important aspects of early childhood music education is that the student learns that he/she is going to make a lot of mistakes and recognizes them immediately by the sound. No one has to tell you have hit a sour note! You figure out what the mistake is, correct it and go on. An important lesson in life.

The piano student learns early to independently use all ten fingers and both hands equally whether he/she is right or left-handed. This skill translates into a myriad of life-long ambidextrous advantages. It probably has some implications on right-left brain development too, but I don't know about that. People are always surprised to learn that I am left-handed until they see me write.

I learned about composers from all over the world, which turned me onto geography, languages and literature. Most of the expressions in music are written in Italian. I became acquainted with that language when I was seven. What I know about opera I learned on my own because of my interest in music. I already knew the stories of the operas, many of which are based on historical events. Now you know why there are references to operas sprinkled throughout this text. I learned the opera stories, first, before I learned the historical context.

I listened off and on to the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts on Public Radio on Saturday afternoons for many years. The intermission features had people talking about the operas, composers, and artists. They even had an "Opera Quiz" for people to send in questions to try and stump the experts. It was fun for me and I learn a lot, listening while I worked on my projects. I have learned quite a bit of French, Italian and German because of opera. Certainly not enough to speak or write fluently of course, but a nodding acquaintance.

There is an interesting phenomenon of how music works on the brain and memory. We remember the lyrics of a song we heard long ago. Listening to the music, we unconsciously learn the words. That is not necessarily true of poems. Ancient societies recognized this fact by using chants in religious ceremonies and their lengthy genealogies. Aside from a song or chant being heard at a farther distance than spoken words, (without amplification), the accuracy of the chant handed down from one generation to another is uncanny. In societies without a written language, the chant was one of the best ways to perpetuate histories and traditions.

Phonetics is the science having to do with speech sounds, the art of pronunciation. There is an International Phonetics Alphabet that looks very similar to many English letters. The phonetic letters are symbols for sounds that all humans are capable of making in any language. Before a child learns to talk, he can babble away making all these sounds. He learns a specific language by stringing these sounds together in the same way he hears them spoken by those around him. He merely imitates what he has heard.

If the words to a song are written in phonetics, on paper they look like nonsensical scribbling. Yet to singers who have learned the Phonetics Alphabet, the words make sense just as written words do in any language. This is a good way for a singer to learn a foreign song without having to study that language. Many opera singers make use of the International Phonetics Alphabet. The music of all great choruses is often written in phonetics. In this way, the diction is perfectly in unison. No foreign or even regional accents allowed!

Music doeth have power to soothe the savage beast, as the old saying goes. There is a huge pasture behind our property with cows. Whenever I have live music going on, the cows line up along the fence to listen. It is the same with birds. They flock to the railing outside the sliding glass doors on the deck. Our cat invariably came and napped on the mat outside the door. Oddly enough, it does not happen when the music is coming from the stereo. Perhaps it has something to do with volume.

From elevator music to dentists' offices, background music is used to presumably relax the hearer. It may or may not work, depending on how high the dental anxiety level is or the elevator passengers' taste in music! Many people, myself included, work better with favorite music in the background. I have found that if the task at hand requires mental concentration such as reading, music sung in English is distracting. Better to listen to something in another language, or better still, instrumental music.

Ah, and then there is what music does for the soul. Our sense of hearing discerns the sounds of speech much as our sense of sight clearly sees in black and white. However, vision in color adds immeasurably to our enjoyment of life. The sound of music evokes and enhances our emotions far more than ordinary speech. That's what music does for the soul.

My big school crisis occurred when I was in seventh grade. I had just started a new Junior High School that I loved and had a brand new bicycle! I came down with nephritis, a kidney infection. This was a deadly serious disease then. Now, antibiotics will clear it up in no time. But back then there was no penicillin. The only treatment was bed rest flat of my back for three months, a low protein diet and absolutely no salt. No eggs, no meat, no milk or dairy products. Mother had to make my bread with no salt, etc. Lots of fruit and veggies. (Veggies with no butter or salt?)

My mother made arrangements for me to keep up my schoolwork assignments. After three months I could go back to school in the mornings only, then come home and go to bed. I had to have my schedule rearranged for only the core subjects - no music, art, or phys. ed. of course. That was my schedule for the rest of the school year.

It was at that time when I was so sick that Pearl Harbor was attacked. We heard it on the radio and although the war clouds had been gathering over Europe for some time we knew that now we were in it too. When we all realized what it was really about, I started to cry and said, "Oh, R.G. and Hootie will be killed." My mother's older sister, Aunt Ida, a widow, was visiting us. Hootie was her son. Both young men were in the armed services.

(Aunt Ida and I were fellow conspirators! From time to time she would sneak me a Milky Way candy bar with my avowed promise not to tell. Mom would have had a hissi-fit! Maybe it was not good for my body but it sure was good for my soul!)

I did recover however. Not long after that we moved to Fort Collins.

Many years later when I became pregnant, with nephritis in my medical history, the doctors were worried as to how that would affect my pregnancy. I had a "pyleogram" x-ray of my kidneys. It showed that I had a "funny looking" kidney because of scar tissue, but it was functioning. Everything has been OK with my kidneys ever since. "Funny looking", but working.

When I was about fourteen during the war, a Ladies' group organized a variety show of local talent to entertain the soldier patients at the huge Fitzsimmon's General Army Hospital in Denver. We were an assortment of singers, dancers and such. For a change, because I was the youngest, I was first on the program. I always took my music with me for a performance to bone up to the very last minute and as a sort of security blanket to ward off the inevitable paralyzing stage fright.

I walked out onto the stage to a chorus of rowdy applause and whistles. This was no polite ladies' club or men's business service organization! I sat down at the piano and the noise continued. I became completely unnerved and couldn't find Middle C let alone the first notes of my piece! I muttered something about forgetting my music and fled backstage to get it. I came back to an even more uproarious audience. I sat down with the hubbub still going on. By then I was mad at them for being so rude!

As always, once I started to play, everything was forgotten and it was just me, the piano and the music. My piece was Claire de Lune by Debussy. Soon the auditorium was very quiet, perhaps moved by the mood and beauty of the music. As I gathered up my music, took my bow and left the stage, the applause was thunderous but be damned, I would not play an encore for that disorderly bunch!

After the show we visited the wards. Of course, everyone remembered the little girl who forgot her music but played well when she did have it. Here were the spoils of war - young men in wheel chairs, the amputees, the blinded, the broken bodies and shattered spirits. Each one of them could have been my brother, R.G. He was at that time fighting in North Africa.

On the sixty-five mile ride home I thought about the rah-rah hype in the movies and the glories of war being generated all the time around us. I remembered and finally understood my parents' stoic respectful silence at Memorial Day and Fourth of July parades as columns of soldiers marched by to the oompah-pah martial music of the high school band. Before, I had thought the parades were so exciting! No more. I no longer thought that there was anything thrilling about war. Sometimes necessary but certainly nothing to take lightly. My dad had been in the army in World War I. My parents knew what war was really about.

R.G. was fighting in Sicily when he was wounded in the leg by shrapnel. He was sent back to a field hospital for three weeks. There he met an Italian girl. He wrote, asking my mother to send him his high school Latin book, hoping to be able to communicate better with his girlfriend. Mom sent it.

He wrote as often as he could. Naturally, he couldn't write about where he was or any details of the war. His letters were sent to us on "V mail", rather crude photographs of the letter from, I presume, microfilm. The "V mails" were about 3 inches by 4 inches and stamped by a censor. We sent letters and packages to his APO address in New York. I remember helping make up and wrapping Christmas packages in August or September with the hope they would get to him in time. He was overseas for well over three years.

Once he wrote to me personally in response to one of my letters. He described how pitiful the children were where he was. He told me, "Every night in your prayers, thank God that you live in America."

I did and I do.

I had a girl friend whose father had cherry orchards. In the summertime, if there were no hailstorms to wipe out the crop, a bunch of our friends picked cherries with her and her dad. We climbed the trees or sometimes used ladders and filled baskets with the cherries. The baskets were about 18 inches long by 3-4 inches wide and 3-4 inches deep. We were paid 2 cents a basket. We could make a whopping whole dollar in a good day! Of course, we clowned around, laughing and talking a lot of the time. We would take a lunch and make a day of it.

One summer German prisoners-of-war were working in the sugar beet fields abutting the cherry orchard. Armed guards stood around keeping an eye on them. Naturally, we were very curious about them. We gathered around the fence trying to get as close a view of them as we could. We were surprised to see that they looked just like any other young men. No horns or tails.

We received a telegram in June of 1944. R.G. was reported missing in action. After three anxious prayer filled weeks, the fateful telegram came that he had been killed at the Anzio Beachhead in Italy. He was 24.

We received official letters regularly from the War Department, (now the Defense Department). He received a Purple Heart Medal and citation with the president's stamped signature. His remains were buried in a temporary military cemetery at Naturno, Italy. Months later we received a box of his personal effects. Along with his own New Testament of the Bible, a comb, a brush for shining boots, and a few pictures, was a small American Flag about 3 inches by 5 inches that he must have carried in his pocket. It was crumpled, dirty and splattered with dried blood.

My mother wrote letter after letter trying to find out what happened. Eventually, we received not an official form, but a personal letter from a chaplain describing R.G.'s death. May 23, 1944, Staff Sergeant Ralph Guy Miller was returning from a patrol with his squad when he stumbled into a land mine.

This was my first experience with the reality of the death of a loved one. Grief is the hardest of all human emotions to deal with. Anger is the easiest. We are accustomed to the feelings of anger and fear from infancy. We are acquainted with everything from petty annoyances that happen every day, to rage inducing events. We know how to handle those feelings. There is action involved, something we can do to cope with anger even if it is inappropriately directed.

It would have been much easier to hate the enemy, the Germans and the Italians that killed R.G. than to mourn his death. Hate all Germans, all Italians? But that didn't make sense.

Fortuitously, the feeling of personal grief is not a frequent emotion. Grief is pain and helplessness. It is much easier to transfer that feeling toward anger and do something about it. That only masks the grief that does not go away. To avoid the helplessness of grief, invariably we turn outward toward anger at something else, often totally unrelated to the object of grief. This is a perfect example of irrational thinking more often than not completely divorced from feelings.

Grief has to be worked through to a point of acceptance. Just as a physical wound hurts so badly at first, in time it heals and the pain goes away. There will always be a scar at the site of the wound however. The buzzword "closure" so prevalent these days is meaningless. Grief becomes part of the repertoire of our feelings and experiences and is with us always as a part of life. This repertoire can either make us better or bitter, whichever way we choose to use it. And we do have a choice.  A well-known and beloved Chinese poet, Tu Fu, once wrote, "For the dusk's path the fireflies must make their own light."₁₅

A number of years later, out of the blue, here came another telegram saying that R.G.'s remains were being returned to the United States and what did my dad want done with them. It was as if R.G. had been killed all over again. Grief overwhelmed us once again, especially my dad. This was after all, his only son. Our line of the family surname died with R.G.

After much discussion, my dad decided that since R.G. had fallen with his buddies in the army, he should remain with them. R.G. is now buried in a Military Cemetery in Nebraska with row, upon row upon row upon row upon row of white headstones. I ultimately became the custodian of R.G.'s records and personal effects.

My Aunt Ida's son, Hootie, was on a B-17 and was shot down. Years after the war was over, his dog tags were found in Holland in a farmer's field and returned to her. All that time she didn't know what had become of him and never did, except he was presumed dead.

At the time, I didn't know this but my Dad had a little New Testament of the Bible that he had carried when he was in the army during World War I. It had his name and military serial number in it. He had given it to R.G. when his young soldier son went off to war. Many, many years later apparently it was found by some kind soul in Italy and turned over to the American Embassy. The Veteran's Administration tracked down my dad's serial number and returned the bedraggled little book to us.

There was an interesting group of people in my hometown with a unique history, the German-Russians. Catherine the Great of Russia invited German nationals to immigrate to the remote Steppes of the Ural Mountains. She wanted that part of her country settled and developed. At the time, it was quite barren. The only inhabitants were wolves. This area is very similar to the Plains States of our country in climate, terrain, etc. Several groups of Germans went, among them German Lutherans and Mennonites because Catherine promised them exemption from conscription into the Russian Army. These people were ardent pacifists.

When they arrived on those Steppes they were totally isolated and impoverished. Catherine provided them with nothing. They had a very rough time scratching out a living and even surviving. They became very bitter toward Catherine and the Russians in general so they turned inward; fiercely retaining their language, religion and culture. They never learned the Russian language and wanted nothing to do with the Russian Orthodox Church. During more than a hundred years they were there they adopted only a few Russian customs such as some clothing and the use of the samovar.

When Catherine died, her son Paul became czar. He hated his mother and either ignored or rescinded many of her edicts. The conscription of the Germans on the Steppes was one of those. So the German-Russian Lutherans began migrating to the U.S. They settled in Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas; in short the Plains States that ultimately became the Nation's "bread basket". The eastern half of Colorado is "Plains".

During those one hundred years in Russia, they had developed the "Red Turkey Winter Wheat" and brought the seed for it with them to the U.S. This is very hardy wheat that is planted in the fall and comes up in the early spring.

The German-Russian immigrants were extremely hard working and as a result, prospered. In time they acquired huge farms on acres and acres of land.

Then along came World War I with a great deal of anti-German animosity. The German-Russian people were brutally ostracized, even vandalized and sometimes were the objects of violence because of their German language even though they had not been in Germany for well over a hundred years.

Once again they closed ranks; stayed on their farms out of town, built their own schools and churches way out in the country. By the time my generation came along, many of them had assimilated in the sense that because of their prosperity they bought businesses in town, and their children entered professions such as doctors and lawyers. Still, they always kept a very low profile. The kids went to school out in the country for grammar school then came into town to the only high school, public or private.

As you can see, the German-Russian people went to great lengths to adhere to one of their pivotal religious belief, that of pacifism. However, during World War II, although some of them claimed Conscientious Objector status, others served in the Armed Services.

I had several very close girl friends in high school who were of German-Russian heritage but I never knew anything about this background at the time. They never spoke German and their English was the same as mine. One of them went to South Dakota to a German-Russian Lutheran private college. Later, I was a bridesmaid in her wedding. It turned out to be a typical German-Russian wedding, quite a bash! It lasted three days with lots of colorful traditions. The wedding party wore their attire the whole time!

Whenever you have a slice of bread, odds are the wheat in it originally came from the Russian Steppes along with those courageous people.

One of the things that was a nightmare for my parents and parents everywhere as well, was polio. Also called Infantile Paralysis, It could paralyze, cripple and kill kids. Occasionally an adult was stricken, but it affected mostly kids. Every summer there was an outbreak of polio. The winters seemed to kill off the virus, but it invariably came back in summer. Whenever there was an outbreak they closed the public swimming pools and lakes. We couldn't go to the movies. Places where crowds of kids gathered were off limits. It put a crimp in our summer fun!

When I was sixteen, in the summer I went to Los Angeles to visit Aunt Ida. I was having a ball in the big city! Aunt Ida was 13 years older than Mother so she was the closest thing I ever had to a grandmother. We were very close. That was a particularly bad summer for polio so they didn't open school for a month in the fall. I was tickled pink because it meant I could stay with Aunt Ida in LA longer!

A perfect example of the difference between the perceptions of kids and adults. We kids were forbidden to do things that could threaten our health or very lives. We didn't understand that, and even if we did, it could not happen to us! For Cave Kids, the Hunters and Gatherers were being mean and spoiling their fun.

There were several kids that our family knew that contracted polio and died. One family had one boy who died and another that was crippled. Another boy had a mild case but he had a permanent limp. I had a very close girl friend when I was in college that had had a bad case of polio. Her legs were like skinny sticks and she forever had to wear braces on them. She had been sent to Warm Springs, Georgia for treatment and rehab. That's where F. D. Roosevelt had spent a lot of his time. He too had had polio.

The effects of polio were quite widespread. The poliovirus caused the muscles to be paralyzed. It could affect any or all muscles of the body. The initial symptoms, like so many others, were similar to the flu. If the chest muscles were affected, the victim could not breathe.

A common picture of the times was that of a patient in an "Iron Lung". It was a long metal cylinder in which the patient's whole body except for the head, was encased. The Iron Lung continually pressed the chest up and down forcing air in and out of the lungs. Of course, the patient required around the clock professional care. When I worked in Houston, one of my bosses had had polio and had spent several years in an Iron Lung. He ultimately was able to breathe on his own, but he was in a wheel chair and had a speech impediment.

The March of Dimes was initially set up to raise funds for the care of polio patients. There were drives to get people to donate their dimes to make a mile of the coins end to end. There was a nurse in Australia, Sister Kenny, who achieved fame with the relatively successful methods she developed to treat the devastating results of polio.

When our boys were born I remember thanking God that the cause of polio had recently been discovered and the vaccine perfected so we would never again have to be concerned about that hideous scourge.

As the human family progresses, can anyone dispute the advances in medical science that have helped so much to alleviate suffering?