PROTECTION, Kansas — Sixty-four years ago, residents of this tiny town in southwestern Kansas set a public health example. They made their town the first in the nation to be fully inoculated against polio.
It’s a different story today.
People in Protection, like those in many rural communities, stand divided over how to slow the spread of the coronavirus and the safety of the vaccines being rolled out to protect them from it.
“A lot of people still believe it (COVID-19) is made up and that it’s not as bad as the media is saying,” said Steve Herd, a 72-year-old farmer who was in the third grade on the day virtually every resident of Protection under 40 got a polio shot.
Some in the town of about 500, he said, insist that the federal government “invented” the coronavirus so that it could force people to take a vaccine containing a microchip that could track their movements.
In 1957, Herd said, “we didn’t have people who believed such crazy stuff.”
Protection’s “Polio Protection Day” took place on April 2, 1957. Families, many dressed in their Sunday best, lined up in the high school gym to get shots from nurses dressed in starched white uniforms.
“There was a lot of excitement that day,” said David Webb, a retired teacher who also was in grade school at the time. `
That event, sponsored by what was then known as the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (now the March of Dimes), received widespread media coverage. So did a parade that took place a couple of weeks later when residents received their second doses of the vaccine.
The Herd family rode on the main float, Steve Herd said, because they looked “average” and because his sister, Cheryl, had survived a bout with polio.
He recalls playing catch with his younger brother, Stan, while his father read the paper and smoked a pipe and at the front of the float.
“Mom, I think, was either standing like she was cooking or she was knitting,” he said.
Stan Herd said there was no debate about the vaccine or the town’s role in promoting it. Everyone thought: “This is what we’re supposed to do.”
Steve Herd still lives on the family farm near Protection. Stan Herd is a Lawrence artist known worldwide for his distinctive crop and landscape works.
Steve Herd can’t imagine the community coming together in a similar way in 2021.
