Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation by Sheila Weller

damaging the interior horns of the spinal cord), could cause paralysis.
    This was the height of the Canadian polio epidemic, which was well on its way to afflicting 8,878 people, mainly children, out of a national population of less than 15 million. While polio cases in the far more populous United States had decreased by a third (from 58,000 to 35,000) over the previous year’s figures, polio in Canada had almost doubled, from its 1952 tally of 4,755. (The wide availability, in 1955, of the polio vaccine created by Jonas Salk would virtually extinguish the disease in both countries.)
    The higher impact of the disease in clean, uncrowded Canada made sense. At the turn of the twentieth century, the polio virus had circulated endemically. Children in then typically large families were exposed to it as a matter of course and developed immunity, which was reinforced by the maternal antibodies they’d acquired from having been breast-fed by immune mothers. But as the practices of breast-feeding and having large families came to be eschewed as “low class,” these ostensibly better-nurtured children were deprived of an indemnifying brush with the virus. This is what made polio so horrific and ironic. Here were civilized families: small, clean, orderly. Yet, as if being punished for virtue, they were ravaged by this paralyzing virus. The poster child for postwar progress—a coddled only child raised in a home kept spotless by a class-conscious mother, in a roomy, clean-aired town—was a prime candidate for this nightmare.
    When her classmates, almost none of whom had ever been on a plane, heard that Joan had been flown to the hospital, a pall of tragic glamour hung over her in her absence. “It was so dramatic, so Joni, it took my breath away,” recalls Anne. “I confess, my first unforgivable reaction was one of envy, before reality and fear set in.” As for Joan’s parents, they “were devastated—you could read it in their faces—but they never cried. Oh, no! No crying from Joan’s mother,” says Sandra. “She was very strong.”
    The polio unit at St. Paul’s was run by the locally legendary Canadian order the Sisters of Charity, also known as “Grey Nuns.” Well before the caseload doubled, the Grey Nuns had been scrambling worriedly to accommodate the glut of new patients who were rolled into the ward daily with high fevers, throbbing headaches, and the virus racing toward their nervous systems. On August 25, 1952, a Grey Nun had written in the group’s log: “The polio epidemic is at its full…We pray Mary to protect the youngsters from this sickness,” only—less than a month later—to have to amend the assessment: “Polio cases are multiplying. To help our overworked nurses, the public health department is sending six additional nurses…. Nine iron lungs are working all the time; eight of which are borrowed from other hospitals in the province.” (Iron lungs were tank respirators into which polio victims were slid on large trays with only their heads exposed. The loudly hissing tanks pushed air pressure into the patients’ diaphragms and chests, doing their breathing for them.) At year’s end the hospital had treated 358 polio patients; 15 died.
    As 1952 had turned to 1953, bad had turned to worse, and by April 20, 1953, plans were made to enlarge the polio ward to a polio department, with a separate entrance, so that the highly contagious new patients “would not pass through the main part of the hospital,” as the nuns put it. It was through that new quarantine entrance that Joan Anderson was wheeled—past the mortifying phalanx of iron-lunged children—and settled into a bed in the full children’s ward. As if the terror, the fever, and the isolation weren’t punishment enough, the ten-year-old was subjected to a torturous-seeming regimen: she was wrapped in almost scalding