When I grew up in the 1950s I knew of many that had died from Polio. My best friend from about age 12 through 21 when he went off to the Viet Nam War in the Air Force had had polio and had braces on his legs until he was 6 or 7. I met him when I was 10 when I gave my bicycle newspaper delivery route to him. I like him as a person then as he was very responsible like I was. Not many boys were working for a living at 10 so it was always nice to see someone that responsible and to meet them.
I had just started having seizures then so I had to give up my newspaper route because my parents were afraid I might have a seizure riding a bicycle. But, that never happened it only was at night when I was asleep and it was like being murdered and having a heart attack or stroke each time it happened. I don't think someone in their 30s would survive this like I could at age 10. People 10 to 15 are very very adaptable in what they can physically survive. At least they were in the 1950s then when I was growing up. After all, my friend survived polio and went on to have the junior high record for the rope climb record that lasted for 25 years before it was broken. He didn't use his legs at all and just used the strength of his arms. Though I considered it dangerous he broke the record that lasted 25 years.
When people I met like Grandparents during the 1950s who were often born around 1870 or 1880 then in the 1950s often they would talk about brown water they had to drink and jackrabbits where they had to spit out the pellets of the shotgun onto their plates when they ate the food. They talked about riding covered wagons, riding horseback, and their first experience when a motorcar spooked their horses for the first time and people often died from this when horses went wild from cars backfiring. Then people died a lot from motorcars because they weren't designed for safety then just mechanical efficiency. The front crank often broke men's arms when the car would backfire during starting. I myself have been thrown over the handlebars of my World War II BSA 500 when I kick started it and it backfired and threw me over the handlebars. Luckily, it didn't break my knee or leg when this happened.
People talked about how if people had 5 children maybe 3 would die and this was normal from the 1880s through about the 1940s or 1950s. Sometimes during World War II all the boys in the family died in the wars and no one was left to run the farm and the parents were sad.
I remember California when there were only about 10 million people in the whole state. It wasn't much different from cowboy days then except for technology and superhighways then in the late 1950s. Dad talked about there not being any paved roads except in cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco when he first came through California in the 1920s when he was a boy in his Dad's old Dodge Touring car they drove from Oregon to California to Texas and Back where there were no paved roads then mostly. He said the alkali in the roads in Arizona and New Mexico some places made your eyes hurt for days and sores would form in your mouth from the dust.
They tied the hunting dogs onto the running boards of the old Dodge in the early 1920s. My Grandfather was an electrical contractor so he traveled around with the family getting electrical contracts wiring up buildings or factories wherever he could during the early teens and 20s. He finally bought a house in Seattle for his kids when the oldest was about 13 around 1927 or so.
Life was difficult always. My father said his father once had to fight 13 men on a job and he won the fight. Life was tough then and my Grand Dad was a Red head that once was a Baseball pitcher they called "Pinky" because of his red hair around the turn of the century.
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