Baseball and Guns

In looking up what baseball games the kids would have been listening to on the radio in 1959, I came across amazing connections between Minnesota and Cuba in that year. Although the Cuban revolution was successful in January, 1959, with Fidel Castro driving out Batista and setting up a revolutionary government, at that time he said he was an anti-imperialist, not a communist. Until the embargo against Cuba enacted in October, 1960, there seems to have been quite a lot of coming and going.

At a baseball game in July between the Rochester Red Wings and the Havana Sugar Kings played in Havana, gunfire celebrating the beginnings of the Cuban revolution got into the stadium, wounding two! This could have ended Cuba’s minor league involvement, but Castro loved baseball. He intervened, assuring everyone that teams that came to Havana would be safe.

The Minneapolis Millers were their league champions that year and in the Little World Series played the Havana Sugar Kings. After a couple of frigid games at the end of September in Minneapolis, the series moved to Havana, playing five games. Castro attended every game along with 3,000 soldiers with guns and bayonets. The Minneapolis players were somewhat unnerved by this, but they still tried their hardest. Nevertheless, they weren’t too sorry that in the end they lost! You can read the whole wild story, including Castro’s threats, told here by a historian of the Millers, Stew Thornley: http://stewthornley.net/millers_havana.html. I found it fascinating!

Polio

Though polio had been around for thousands of years, a combination of factors gave it a significant impact on the early 1950’s. Paradoxically, better sanitation and water supplies had resulted in the fact that many kids hadn’t developed an immunity to it. Although 90% of infectious viral attacks of polio act like some version of the flu, in acute cases nerves are affected, causing paralysis, with the greatest risk of this in children from 5 to 9 years. If there is respiratory paralysis, the victim may die. The polio epidemics of the early 1950’s were the worst seen in the United States. In 1952, 58,000 cases were reported, and in 1953, 35,000 cases.

Intensive care and rehabilitation therapy as we now know them, had their origins in the years of these great polio epidemics. The widespread funding of campaigns to find vaccines and cures also began with the race to find a polio vaccine. Jonas Salk developed an injected vaccine, which required years of testing, but began to be widely administered in 1955. By 1957 the number of polio cases was down to 5,600 and in 1961, only 161 cases were reported in the U.S. Based on testing, oral vaccines developed by Albert Sabin were chosen for worldwide distribution. According to the Global Eradication Initiative, 1,349 cases world-wide were reported in 2010.

The story of the campaign against polio has been widely told. Paul, one of the characters in “The Pastor’s Kids”, contracts polio in 1952 when he is about four years old. The story of how his illness affects the family, including years of rehabilitation and painful reconstructive surgeries are part of the book. In my research, one of the things I have been struck by is the stoicism induced in the kids who had it. One woman who had polio said she still has difficulty crying. It was a powerful message to be told at age four, “Don’t cry. It will make your parents feel bad.”

Kids taking oral vaccine, about 1960

Rehabilitation was long, slow, hard work. But victims of polio were encouraged to overcome disability, “triumph over adversity”, and become independent and productive people. An important part of rehabilitation was learning to accept gracefully the successes achieved, and to compensate for the disabilities that remained. Some people who had polio, after years of working parts of their bodies harder than other parts, are now faced with post-polio syndrome. As a part of coming to terms with this, they are re-visiting their childhood memories of being little kids, isolated from their families and confused about why they were ill.

Once polio vaccines were in place, the disease receded in the collective imagination. This is probably a good thing, but for people of my age, polio was a real part of childhood.

Amana Freezer

In the late 1950’s, Dad and Mother accepted their fate (seven kids and another to follow) and bought a giant freezer made by craftsmen at the Amana Colonies in Iowa. The Amana Colonies [www.amanacolonies.com]  were established by a group of German Pietists who came to America seeking religious freedom, arriving in Iowa in 1855. Until about the 1930’s they lived a truly communal life, but then had to adapt to more family-driven work with profit-sharing for their farmland and larger businesses. They have always been known for their craftsmanship, and are still known for the refrigeration appliances they manufacture.

Several towns in east central Iowa near Cedar Rapids are part of the Amana group. In the early 1960’s they already understood that tourists might be interested in their way of life and crafts. We visited the communal kitchen, a general store stocked with old-fashioned items, the meetinghouse and the blacksmith shop. And for almost the only time I can remember, Mother and Dad bought a restaurant meal for all ten of us. It was served family style at a long table, with many dishes of wonderful home-grown meats and vegetables, great bread and salad. I no longer remember exactly what we ate, but I have a mental picture of my proud father at the end of the long table, treating his kids to an experience he probably could ill afford.

The freezer was at least six feet long, three and a half feet high and opened from the top. It could hold a great deal! I remember it stocked in the fall with sweet corn after we had spent an entire day in our big farmhouse kitchen, parboiling cobs of corn and then cutting the kernels off them and putting them in freezer bags. We did the same with some of the other produce from our half acre garden. Dad sometimes bought part of a cow or a pig and had it butchered and frozen, available for future meals. Occasionally Dad's congregations would give us a “pounding”, i.e. contribute pounds of food which we gratefully stored away for use by our big family. This would often include frozen meat.

During hunting season, I remember gifts of whole pheasants and wild ducks in the freezer, something Mother wasn’t too happy about! Us kids weren’t very used to gamey-tasting meat either. But when Dad shot a deer with a bow and arrow, the venison that resulted filled the freezer for some time.

Rather than canning, in the late 1950’s and 1960’s, people believed in frozen food. And we certainly ate plenty of it. At Christmas, each of us girls chose a favorite cookie recipe and baked up huge batches of them, to be frozen for unexpected guests. The essence of hospitality at the time was Norwegian gasoline (weak coffee) and cookies, and it might be needed at almost any time of day. The freezer was a great help in living up to this social norm! At this very moment I am recalling how delicious a chocolate chip cookie just pulled from the freezer was, though none of my chocolate chip cookies are around long enough to need freezing these days!