Party At The Elks Club

The man from the Elks Club came for me in a large black Lincoln, a ’49 or ’50 with “suicide” rear doors and extremely attractive chromed inset headlamps.

He had me sit, alone, in the sumptuously upholstered back seat. I felt very tiny. It was the man’s job to drive me in this limousine from the family home in Fort Lupton to the Elks Club adjacent to the courthouse in downtown Greeley.

The occasion was the annual Elks Club Christmas party for crippled children. Santa was going to be there, I was assured.

Also present was an array of unfortunate children. A hydrocephalic boy was next to a girl with cerebral palsy. A kid with no hands shared a table with a Down Syndrome fellow.

Several children suffering from multiple sclerosis were there, right alongside kids with cystic fibrosis. There were several who had survived infantile paralysis, as had I. The blind and the deaf were included.

Having been a patient at Children’s Hospital in Denver on several occasions, this crowd wasn’t particularly unusual for me. You see everything in a children’s hospital. Seeing children in far worse shape than I was not a new experience.

To be sure, the Elks were trying to be charitable, attempting to produce a cheering holiday event for unfortunate children. A little boy with no lips and no palate laughed gleefully when he released his helium balloon and it floated lazily to the ceiling two stories above. For him, the party was a success.

But I was getting a mixed message. A very confusing mixed message.

At home, my parents were telling me that if I did my exercises and if I tried always to “keep my toe in” when I walked, I could eventually recover from the effects of polio.

If I endured all the surgeries being suggested, and if things went just right, I could one day be normal.

And yet, when the Elks Club offered to take me in a big black car to a remote location where I would spend the afternoon with other “crippled” children, my parents happily sent me.

So which was I? Normal, like most of the other kids at school? Or was I a monster like May, the mean-spirited Down Syndrome orphan girl from China who would bite you with her pointy teeth and give you an infection?

Upon reflection, I’m not so sure the Elks party was a good thing. Was it beneficial to gather young monsters from all over northern Colorado and put them in the same room all afternoon?

What do you think?

The red lipstick

At first, because the doctors didn’t know much about infantile paralysis, children stricken with it were hospitalized in isolation rooms.

It is a nasty, contagious virus, after all, and isolation, although painful emotionally, was a necessity. At age 4, I understood this.

I was alone in a room with glass on all four sides. My parents came every day, at least once a day, and tried to talk to me through the glass.

It was understandable that the barber who visited other Children’s Hospital patients balked at entering the isolation rooms. As a result, my curly blond hair got rather long. This brought me a lot of attention, and I came to like it that way.

But somebody had to come into that room and pick up my bedpan, if nothing else.

So they sent in this beautiful woman. I mean, imagine the most beautiful woman you’ve ever seen. This one was blonde. Buxom. She was clad all in white -- white shoes, white form-fitting dress, pert little white nurse’s cap. The perfume must have been White Shoulders. (The aroma made her beautiful even with my eyes closed.)

But the white sanitary mask got in the way. As she should have done, every time she came into the isolation room, she wore the protective mask over her nose and mouth.

I could see just a little glimmer of red under the fabric. Just a hint. So I pestered the poor woman. Over and over, I persisted, “Let me see your lips.”

By and by, she allowed it. She looked left, she looked right, and seeing no nosy authorities nearby, she held her breath and momentarily dropped the mask.

Gloriosky. Lordy lordy. Cherry Red lipstick against all that white was simply overwhelming. I treasure the memory. Thank you Nurse Nancy or whoever you were. That was the experience of a lifetime for this little boy.

To this day, I don’t have much use for barbers. And, I’m still pretty persuasive with the women.

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Dad thought if I was going to be normal, it would be a good idea for me to “go out” for football. So in eighth grade at Brighton, I did just that. It’s what normal kids do.

One afternoon Dad came to a practice. I saw him standing on the sidelines. It was the day we trainees were to crash into each other, performing intentional head-on collisions.

A line of boys on one side and a line of boys on the other. “Coach” would yell “Go” and one boy from each side would run, head lowered, toward the other boy until contact took place.

When “Coach” yelled go and it was my turn, the kid on the other side was a bruiser with the last name of Salazar.

Bang. The lights went out. I don’t know how long I was unconscious, a few seconds probably.

When I shook off my injury and stood up, I looked for Dad but he was gone. I took the hit but he was the one who couldn’t take the pain.

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Gratitude

Laura and I showed up a few minutes late for the Brighton High School Class of ’60 Fifty-year reunion picnic last Sunday.

In retrospect, we were thankful that we were 15 minutes late. Had we been on time, we might have been trampled in the food stampede. No food remained by the time we got there. Neither scrap nor crumb could be found.

If I ever find out who it was, the piglet (or piglets) who ate our sausages for which we had prepaid $30.00, I will punch him or her squarely in the nose.

I mean really. This is not an idle threat. You know who you are, you rude piglets. Watch your rearview.

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Word of the Week: Hydrocephalus. It’s from Latin and Greek, hydro, water, and kephalon, head. In humans it is a condition characterized by an abnormal increase in the amount of fluid in the cranium, causing enlargement of the head accompanied by a wasting away of the brain, and loss of cognitive ability. It’s not fun.