We Make Our Debut
When our parents brought us home from the hospital, many of us got our first automobile ride. Most likely, we were first swaddled to protect us from the weather, and then we were tucked lovingly into a cozy little "bassinette" (which in some cases looked a lot like a painted fruit basket).
1940s bassinette
rubylane.com
Into the back seat we went, perhaps to ride in a shiny new post-war Packard or DeSoto taxi,
1946 DeSoto Taxi
Wikimedia Commons
or in our parents' Hudson, or maybe in our Uncle Henry's Studebaker.
1946 Studebaker coupe
Flickr
While most of us soon were cozy in our cribs, our parents sometimes worried. Even if we seemed healthy, there were risks ahead. Certain childhood diseases still were not preventable, although the new antibiotics offered optimism - secondary infections often could be controlled, and fewer children would die. Influenza would come around again, and it would be hard on children. Although tuberculosis often was curable, it was still around; 4 out of every 10,000 Americans had it. Any nearby coughs would make our folks nervous.
Polio frightened our parents more than any other disease. There was good cause to worry. For decades, it had been on the rise. In 1952, the year most of us would begin First Grade, 60,000 American children would contract polio. It would kill 3,000 of them, and thousands of the survivors would live afterwards with partial or total paralysis. Some of them would be confined to iron lungs well into adulthood.
So many children got polio that there were group iron lungs.
Boston Children's Hospital Archive
Despite all the gloomy possibilities, 1946 gave Americans at least three reasons to feel positive about their families' health prospects. President Harry Truman proposed, and was given Congressional assistance for, Federal loans to communities to establish improved levels of hospital care across the country. The CDC (originally called the Communicable Disease Center) was created. The National School Lunch Act established a framework for promoting childhood nutrition.
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