When I noticed the thin scab on my upper thigh, I was filled with 5-year-old pride.

It was 1940. The dime-sized scab was my badge of courage and my ticket to enter kindergarten.

A few days earlier, I’d sat on my mom’s lap while a doctor put a drop of liquid on my thigh, then seemed to lightly scratch the area under the liquid.

I’d just received my smallpox vaccination.

Twelve years later, after my junior year in high school. My family moved from California to Texas, where my dad had taken a new job.

It was the summer of 1952.

We’d been in Houston for a scant three weeks when my dad came home from work, and with three Greyhound Bus Tickets in hand.

And a bottle of Listerine.

“Two people on our block have polio. One is dead, and the other is very sick. I’m worried you’ll catch it.”

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