The Palimpsest

Swaim, Ginalie

Our Ticket to 1950s Culture': Accounts of Early Television in Our Readers' Households

How Will I Ever Get the Dishes Done?': Grace Karr's Take on Television

McDaniel, George William

English

Smith Wildman Brookhart: The Man Who "Taught the Army How to Shoot'

Bennett, Mary

The Man Behind the Camera: Fred W. Kent

An Iow 
Polio 
Portfolio, 
1939 to 
1959
Polio was not new to Iowans of the 1950s. In 1910, Iowa 
had reported 565 cases—a hundred more than in 1951. 
Polio seemed to strike every few years in Iowa, withy r
usually 170 to 220 cases. But bv the 1940s the numbers 
began to climb dramatically.
While Iowa health department reports give us the 
statistical dimension of the epidemics, historical 
photographs provide the human dimension. The follow­
ing photos from the Des Moines Register and Tribune, 
1939 through 1959, put a human face on the disease 
and reflect the nations hope that polio would indeed he 
conquered, by medical treatment and by the human 
spirit. —The Editor
1
November 1939: One Friday, nineteen-year-old 
Florence Stumbo, a student nurse at Mercy Hospital in 
Des Moines, was diagnosed with polio. Typically, the 
symptoms progressed quickly: by Sunday she was in an 
iron lung. By Tuesday her condition was “much 
improved." The city already had four iron lungs; this 
one, at Broadlawns Hospital, was bought by the Des 
Moines Business and Professional Womens Club.
4 TUE PALIMPSEST
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September 1940: Nurse Ruth Swanson and Dr. E. K. 
Vaubel take blood from Robert Harrell of Winterset. 
The blood, from donors who showed signs of paralysis 
from polio, would be used to make serum. Donors from 
Winterset, Indianola, Ames, Van Meter, Knoxville, and 
Des Moines gathered at a clinic set up in the Des 
Moines city hall. In 1940 the number of polio cases was 
a record high for Iowa—927. Sixty-four Iowans would 
die from polio that year.
SPRING 1994 5
January 1943: Two-year-old Michael R. Sullivan is 
distracted by a hefty book while receiving treatment to 
ease muscular pain. A moist, woolen hot pack was 
applied to his leg at the Kenny Clinic in Iowa Lutheran 
Hospital in Des Moines. Sullivan had had polio since he 
was six months old, and was now learning to walk with­
out a leg brace.
6 THE PALIMPSEST
February 1947: Albert Hook, an employee at Millers 
Dry Cleaning Plant in Des Moines, adds to a polio fund 
basket started by co-worker Nick Critelli. The sign 
reads “YOU MAY he next so give $.” By 1947 the num­
ber of cases had dropped to 176, but the next three 
years would see an alarming rise—an average of 1,300 
cases yearly.
SPRING 1994 7
January 1948: After nine months at the Kenny Clinic 
in Des Moines and a recent fitting for braces, Joanne 
Clark could now “walk a little." Here she shows painted 
plastic birds she made at the clinic to Municipal Judge 
Ralph D. Moore. Moore brought good news for the 
seven patients at the cottage: his Moose lodge had 
already collected $102 in its polio fund. Nationally, 
more good news would come next year: three doctors at 
Harvard Medical School would grow the polio virus in 
human and monkey tissue, work that would earn them 
the Nobel Prize in 1954.
8 THE PALIMPSEST
February 1951: Five-year-old David Rathjen practices 
climbing with physical therapist Mrs. J. C. Sullivan. The 
Des Moines Railway Co. had donated the “bus steps” to 
Blank Memorial Hospital in Des Moines.
SPUING 1994 9
—  \
June 1951: A young girl at the Kenny Cottage receives 
a woolen hot pack. When the virus invaded the nervous 
system, it caused headaches, stiffness, and in severe 
cases, paralysis. Milder cases were marked by sore 
throat, low fevers, and gastrointestinal upset—symp­
toms common to many less worrisome diseases.
10 THE PALIMPSEST
August 1952: Bernice Burris reaches into an iron lung 
in the polio ward at Broadlawns Hospital in Des 
Moines. Meanwhile, Sioux City had become one of theJ
first national test sites for a gamma globulin vaccine. 
Twenty-one doctors and nurses arrived in July to begin 
inoculating 16,500 children in Woodbury County and 
neighboring Dakota County in Nebraska. Iron lungs 
were flown into Sioux City', and entertainer Bob Hope 
arrived for a benefit fund-raiser and visits to hospitals.
SPUING 1994
November 1952: Seven children with polio celebrate a 
birthday at Iowa Lutheran Hospital in Des Moines.
Polio cases in Iowa would peak that year—at 3,564 
cases reported, and 163 deaths. Sioux City alone had 
923 cases. Parents kept their children away from swim­
ming pools and other public places. Even sending ones 
child to school seemed risky.
12 THE PALIMPSEST
August 1959: Siblings Reva, Laverne, and Elaine 
Briggs from Villisea receive physical therapy at the 
Younker Memorial Rehabilitation Center in Des 
Moines. Mary Bellas, standing, was one of four regis­
tered physical therapists sent to Des Moines. Although 
therapy and rehabilitation continued for those with 
postpolio disabilities, a vaccine was now available. In 
1955 Congress had allocated $30 million to help states 
buy the Salk vaccine, and the number of Iowa cases 
plummeted—from 1,445 in 1954, to 580 in 1956, to 78 
in 1957.
SPRING 1994 1 3

December 1959: Ten-year-old Hal 
Richard Bowers heads home from the 
Junior League Home for 
Convalescents in Des Moines. In 1962 
the more effective Sabin vaccine 
would supplant the Salk vaccine.
By 1965, the number of cases would 
decline to 72 nationally. The epidemic 
was over. □
SPRING 1994 15
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An Iowa Polio Portfolio, 1939 to 1959

i
Capitalists Coleslaw 
and the Two Bite Club: 
Cooking for Iowa Students
HERE'S THE CHALLENGE: Work with limited 
facilities, take advantage of government surpluses, 
plan affordable, nutritious, and appealing menus, 
and don't despair if some students turn up their 
noses at what you've just offered them. These cir­
cumstances have faced the women who have 
planned, prepared, and served food for Iowa's 
schoolchildren since earlv in this century.
Anna Johnson was a rural teacher from 1925 to 
1967. “We really were not cooks, but had to heat 
soup and beans, bake potatoes in the ashes and 
heat food which wits brought to school after a hot 
lunch program was started. . . . One family each 
day was to see that a hot dish was furnished,” she 
recalled in the Winter 1975 Annuls of Iowa. “Some 
days we got nothing because mother forgot, or two 
meals were brought the same day, or it was brought 
just as we were about to start our classes.”
In the 1940s Norma Miller attended a rural 
Guthrie County school. She recalls going with her 
father, the school director, to pick up government 
commodities at the railroad siding. Her teacher’s 
cooking unit on a heating stove was surrounded by 
a metal box casing to protect children who might 
fall against it. (Miller later joined Iowa’s school 
lunch program staff, and has worked there for 
forty-three years.)
By the 1960s and 1970s, food service personnel 
encountered new terms like engineered foods 
(nutritionally enriched), competitive foods (“junk” 
foods), and multicultural foods (reflecting ethnic 
diversity). But new terms didn't change finicky 
appetites. Adele Voss of Council Bluffs bemoaned
148 THE PALIMPSEST
Left: Rebecca Simms planned and served meals in 
Russell public school, December 1944. Below: Food 
service worker at Waterloo’s Logan Intermediate 
School, about 1981, with holiday cookies.
this in 1970: “There goes the buzzer, our lunch 
hour’s begun,/Sore and aching feet, but smile at 
everyone./Hands are working fast to fill up the 
trays,/ Everybody rushing by, but not one word of 
praise.” Kitchen camaraderie helped; she ended 
her poem: “A nicer bunch of ‘gals,' I'm sure I'll 
never meet.”
In Waterloo, food service staff Doris Bishop and 
Paul McClain began the “Two Bite Club” in 1974. 
Roosevelt Elementary students who tried at least 
two bites of everything on their trays received spe­
cial pins. “Quite a few students still wore their pins 
at the end of the year, and plate waste was notice­
ably reduced,” reported home economics coordi­
nator Fern Hammelman.
In 1976, schools might have offered dishes like 
Can't-Tell-A-Lie Cherry Pie, Covered Wagon Chili, 
Nuts and Bolts Mixed Vegetables, and Capitalists 
Coleslaw. The national Child N utrition 
Bicentennial Project had distributed thirteen his­
torical theme menus to school lunch programs. 
Martian Milk and 2001 Biscuits saluted the future.
“There's more to school lunches than just cook­
ing and serving them,” Frances Crawford told the 
Des Moines Register in April 1967. “You have to have 
talents in math, business, psychology and home 
economics in addition to cooking skills.” Crawford 
directed T ip ton ’s school lunch staff and was 
regional director for the American School Food 
Service Association. “School lunches are like plays,” 
she added. “You give a little better performance 
when you have a little applause.”
— The Editor
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Capitalist Coleslaw and the Two Bite Club: Cooking for Iowa Students

Caplan, Richard M

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N evada, Iow a, about 1890. O le K. Hill, Story C ounty recorder, lived  in N evada— and died there in 1883 o f leprosy.
Leprosy in Iowa
The Tale of Ole K. Hill
by Richard M. Caplan
J
UST AS PERSONS IMMIGRATE, so
do diseases. Thus it happened that a small 
number of persons carrying the disease 
we call leprosy came to Iowa in the mid­
dle 1800s. They were persons emigrating 
from the western part of Norway, where as 
many as 7 percent of the population may then 
have been infected. Many persons today think
4 6  TH E PALIMPSEST
that leprosy is a disease of the tropics, perhaps 
because most of the 12 to 15 mi lion persons 
now infected live in the tropical or subtropical 
areas of Asia, Africa, or Latin America. The dis­
ease is still, a problem, however, in the high- 
mountain country of Nepal, more related to 
circumstances of poverty with its attendant 
crowding, malnutrition, and suboptimal sanita-
tion than to terrain, temperature, or altitude. 
And in the Middle Ages there may have been 
as many as 20,000 hospitals for people with lep­
rosy in Europe, certainly including 
Scandinavia, and even north of the Arctic 
Circle.
Although the disease had vanished from 
much of Europe by the nineteenth century, the 
area near Bergen on Norway’s west coast was 
still a locus of many patients. That nation's 
main leprosy hospital was located there, direct­
ed by Dr. Armauer Hansen. In 1873, when 
medical bacteriology was yet in its infancy, 
Hansen discovered that a bacterium caused the 
disease. (In tribute to the doctor’s contribution 
to the understanding of leprosy, and of infec­
tious diseases in general, the disease is now 
known as Hansen’s disease. This name also 
attempts to avoid the enormous stigma that has 
been attached over the centuries to the names 
“leprosy” and “leper.”)
Because the incubation period of Hansens 
disease usually lasts several years, or even sev­
eral decades, the infection could easily have 
Iteen transported to the United States by per­
sons who had no knowledge of their condition. 
And thus instances of Hansen's disease 
appeared in population centers of Norwegian 
immigration into the upper Midwest. In Iowa, 
Norwegians had settled in northeastern Iowa 
(especially Winneshiek County), central Iowa 
(northern Polk County and Story County), and 
north-central Iowa (Mitchell, Worth, and 
Winnebago counties).
An 1886 report on Hansens disease in Iowa, 
Minnesota, Illinois, and Wisconsin listed by 
name eight men who had died of leprosy in 
Iowa. Seven had died between 1863 and 1877, 
all in Winneshiek County. Because Iowa 
required death certificates starting in 1880, 
more can be learned about the eighth man, Ole 
K. Hill, who died in Nevada, Iowa, in 1883.
Hill had served as county recorder of Story 
County, having been elected as a Republican in 
1874 and re-elected in 1876 and 1878. His 
handsome, florid signature yet adorns the 
records of land sales and mortgages for those 
years. His illness apparently began to interfere 
with his work and he did not stand for re-elec­
tion in 1880. The obit uary notices in the 
Nevada newspapers clearly suggested he had
suffered a lingering illness with much debility 
for months or years, during which he was 
nursed by his wife. (In those instances in which 
the illness leads to death, it usually occurs by 
gradual impairment of nerve function especial­
ly in the hands and feet, causing loss of sensa­
tion, which allows injury, ordinary infection 
leading to loss of fingers and toes, loss of 
weight, and ultimately, blood poisoning or 
oneumonia. Skin and deeper structures of the 
lands and feet are injured, burned, and infect­
ed, and become resorbed in the healing 
process; the notion of the skin simply “falling 
oil' is incorrect.) Hill died August ¡7, 1883, 
just short of his thirty-ninth birthday. His death 
certificate, signed by Dr. P. Farrar, listed the 
cause of death by an ancient name for leprosy, 
“elephantiasis graecorum” and called it a com­
plication of leprosy. The duration of the illness 
was given as ten years.
In a letter dated February 21, 1885, Dr. 
Farrar wrote to the secretary of the State Board 
of Health, I have ascertained that Ole K. Hill 
came from Olen (pronounced nearly like 
‘Airlen’), District of Bergen, Norway, in the 
year 1866. . . .  In Norway his occupation was 
that of a fisherman. . . .  A sister (I think) died 
of it there many years ago. . . . His father, 
mother, one brother and two sisters, live in this 
county (farm name-Haugé), and betray no 
symptoms of the disease.”
Hills prominence as former county recorder 
led to longer-than-usual obituaries in The 
Nevada Representative and the Story Countij 
Watchman, as well as formal, highly com­
mendatory resolutions of condolence from 
three lodges in which he was active. The 
Nevada Representative said, “Mr. Hill was born 
in Norway September 22d 1844 and removed 
to this country in the summer of 1866, when he 
was twenty two years old. Although a man 
grown on arrival here, he at once assiduously 
went to work to acquaint himself with our lan­
guage. To accomplish this he attended school at 
Des Moines several months, and because of his 
earnest desire and diligence he acquired such 
knowledge of the language of the country of his 
adoption that soon it could scarcely be detected 
from his talk that he was of foreign birth.” In 
1870 at census-time he was working as a helper 
in a variety store in Cambridge, Iowa. In
SPRING 1994 47
December 1871, "lie married R. Kate Kinsell, 
with whom he lived happily until his death. 
Census records indicate that she and her par­
ents were from Pennsylvania. There is no 
record of any children horn to the couple. (The 
anglicized name “Hill,” common among 
Norwegian families of this area, likely derives 
from the Norwegian original, Hauge/Haugen, 
meaning hill/s.)
It seems unlikely that the diagnosis was made 
or confirmed, in a modern clinical sense, by 
Farrar, who signed the death certificate. More 
likely is that Hill was acquainted with the mani­
festations of the disease from his earlier years 
in the highly endemic area around Bergen.
The infection never appeared among the 
Norwegian population born in this country. 
This fact was enormously important to 
Norwegian doctor Armauer Hansens struggle 
to persuade the scientific world that the disease 
was a transmissible infection due to the organ­
ism Mycobacterium leprae, which lie had 
described, and that it was not an inherited con­
dition, which most medical authorities of the 
time firmly believed. So important was this 
observation that Hansen traveled to Minnesota 
in 1888 specifically to examine the offspring of 
émigrés with leprosy. He assured himself that 
none showed evidence of involvement. More 
years were necessary to completely bury such 
causative speculations as heredity, miasma, eat­
ing contaminated fish, or especially, divine ret­
ribution for moral lapse. Hansen’s disease or 
even suspicion of it, perhaps more than any 
other historically known illness, has carried anJ
enormous stigma perpetuated in Western soci­
ety by biblical passages and artistic images. 
Even today, however, sin-plus-punishment 
remains a highly popular explanation for all 
sorts of medical af flictions, a too-ready answer 
for “Why me?" or "Why them?”
After Hill’s death in 1883, it appears that 
there were no more instances of Hansens dis­
ease in Iowa until after World War II. Since 
then, twelve cases of leprosy have appeared in 
Iowa. Two of these were native Iowans who 
had lived for several years in parts of the world 
where Hansens disease is still prevalent. The 
other patients were mostly from India and 
southeastern Asia. The illness had come to an 
end in Norway and its émigrés much earlier.
Scientists long believed that Hansens disease 
could be transmitted only by human-to-human 
contact. In recent years, however, researchers 
have proved that the same bacterium can infect 
both humans and animals. The first proven 
instance of Hansen’s disease in a non-human 
primate appeared in a chimpanzee imported to 
the University of Iowa as a research subject 
from Sierra Leone, an area where manv 
humans have the disease. The nine-banded 
armadillo, which has migrated into Texas and 
Louisiana from northern Mexico, also can be 
infected, and probably represents an animal 
reservoir from which humans can acquire the 
infection. Because the armadillo appears to be 
the only animal that can be infected easily, itJ J 7
also has provided for the first time an excellent 
opportunity for further research (including 
drug trials that could not ethically be per­
formed on patients) and for the development of 
a vaccine.
The hazard of this infection in Iowa remains 
minuscule, and drugs can now usually control 
the infection. In other parts of the world, how­
ever, the threat is still serious. In fact, in 1991 
the World Health Organization resolved to 
eliminate Hansen’s disease as a public health 
problem by the year 2000. This would eradi­
cate the disease that crossed the Atlantic with 
European immigrants a century ago, and that 
cut Iowan Ole K. Hill’s life short at age thirty- 
eight. U
NOTE ON SOURCES
News items or obituaries for Ole K Hill appeared in the Ston/ 
County Watchman (Aug. 17,24, and 31. 1883) and the Nevada 
Rejireseritative (Aug. 22 and 19, 1883). The report on Hansen’s 
disease in Iowa, Illinois, Minnesota, and Wisconsin was part of 
YV. M. Gibson. Reports on Leprosy to His Hawaiian Majesty's 
Government (Honolulu, 1886), pp 198-205. The first national 
disease registry ever attempted, the Norwegian national leprosy 
registry, Begun in 1856, was still active at least until 19/1. In 
1556, the registry tallied 2,858 patients, the highest number 
alive at any time. See L. M. Irgens and T Bjerkedal 
Epidemiology of Leprosy in Norway The History' of the 
National Leprosy Registry of Norway f rom 1856 until Today." 
International Jon mat of Epidemiology 41 (1973): 81-89. Other 
useful sources include W. L. Washburn, “Leprosy among 
Scandinavian Settlers in the Upper Mississippi Y7alley, 
1864-1932, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 24 (1950): 
123-48; R. M. Caplan, "The Importation of Leprosy into Iowa," 
loiva Medicine ( forthcoming); and J R. Leininger, K. J 
Donham, and YY’. M. Meyers, "Leprosy in a Chimpanzee: 
Postmortem Lesions, International Journal o f Leprosy 48 
(1980): 414-21..
4 8  TH E PALIMPSEST


Leprosy in Iowa: The Tale of Ole K. Hill

Finding palimpsests in day-to-day living
This fall we asked readers to help celebrate the 75th anniversary o f  The Palimpsest magazine 
by using that m ost unusual word: palimpsest. (Remember: the word is defined on the inside front 
cover.) These six readers found its meaning in their immediate lives. — The editor
“I saw in his face a palimpsest of Iowa farming, the lined brow from a 
dozen dry years, the red, rough skin from fifty harvests.”
Gordon Marshall (Milwaukee, Wisconsin)
“My workbench has become a palimpsest of twenty years of woodwork­
ing. Every time I go to make another full-scale drawing or mix another 
custom stain, the lines and colors that cover the work surface evoke 
memories of pieces of furniture that long ago found new homes.”
Russell Karkowski (Solon, Iowa)
“James Walter Shannon probably never knew the word ‘palimpsest’ but 
might well be one of the greatest of American palimpsests, in that while 
living in western Nebraska he searched for and collected Indian arrow­
heads and artifacts as he became a top authority on the Oregon Trail 
that passed through the area. Interested in all early ‘imprints’ he also 
collected antiques important in early agricultural American life, sharing 
always his passion, and delight, with grandchildren and friends.”
Latha Shannon Bonnewell (Dubuque, Iowa)
“My grandma’s patchwork quilt was a palimpsest—memories sewed to­
gether, to keep me warm.”
Virginia C. McCammon (Des Moines, Iowa)
“The layers of dirt and soot on my torn jeans are a veritable palimpsest, 
revealing my encounters with the fresh morning grass and dew, with a 
big, beat-up, yellow 1977 Ford LTD and its monster 351 Cleveland oil- 
burner, with an old chair stained with grease, and finally, with the for­
ests and wetlands of northern Johnson County.”
Kurt Berge (Iowa City, Iowa)
“My mother, Beth Coon, is an antique dealer and furniture restorer. I 
have grown up watching her lovingly hand strip antiques of all varieties, 
working through the palimpsest the years have left. From eight or nine 
coats of paint in as many colors on a mission-oak table, to the dull pa­
tina on brass knobs, to badly damaged veneer on the drawers of a pos­
sum-belly cabinet, the layers are a testament to the lives of the furniture. 
With infinite patience and the joy of discovery, she strips away, bit by bit, 
all that obscures the natural beauty of the fine craftsmanship of ages 
past.” Stephanie Coon (Ames, Iowa)
192 THE PALIMPSEST


Finding Palimpsests in Day-to-Day Living

Kramme, Michael

If It's a Cass Show It's a Good Show'

Index for 1994

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