Roy Exum: My One Memory

  • Thursday, December 3, 2020
  • Roy Exum
Roy Exum
Roy Exum

I have a peculiar affliction – one of many, I might add – where my brain doesn’t allow me to remember much of my past. Seriously, you can ask me what Super Bowl I attended in New Orleans and I cannot tell you the two teams that played. Ask me what year I watched Jack Nicklaus walk up the 18th at Augusta to win his last Masters and I draw a total blank. I’ve had over 150 surgeries, and I don’t count the ones if I am not hospitalized overnight, and I remember “zero.” Even when my leg was removed last December, I now remember precious little about the ordeal itself.

I know it’s weird and crazy but sometimes it isn’t all bad…

I have learned to fake my memory “absence” pretty well. Last week I was going to write a story about my favorite football game of all time, Auburn’s 30-20 win in the Iron Bowl over Alabama (the first year the game was played in Auburn) but I couldn’t tell you the year. I Googled it, and as I read it was 1989 and then read what I had written 31 years ago, a tsunami of warm memories came flooding back, so much so I could have given a one-hour speech on simply the anecdotes of what a memorial day that was.

Sure, I’ve talked to a fistful of psychiatrists and psychologists about it and one theory is that surgeries – like divorces and failed attempts and really stupid decisions -- are “pain” and my escape mechanism from any pain in my life has always been, “It happened, it’s over, and I never want to think about it, or speak of it again.” In short, I subconsciously erase any pain from my thoughts. It’s not a “sudden onset” deal; this has been going on for well over 30 years I know, maybe longer, so I cope with it. Even at that, I fight depression pretty hard and use humor as my favorite crutch, along with medication of course.

But I’m serious … If I can ‘prompt’ and prepare myself, whether going through old pictures or reading some of the many thousands of stories I have written in over a half-century, the memories will come back in technicolor. Thank God the funny stuff is at the head of every herd. I rarely dwell on the past because I can’t. I am unable to remember, but I can retain the lessons I have learned. Wacky, huh? I get calls from longtime friends who are talk-radio guys around the South, and do more “memory lane” interviews than ever before, but once I know the topic and the questions, I promise to call them back so I can trigger my memories, make a few notes, and startle people with my eye-witness knowledge.

Of my earliest years and oh so many adventures, I am comforted I had so many good times and I can look at pictures of my family, or the many family dogs we had, or of Elmer and Belle (the black couple who had so much to do with how I was raised.) That brings such monumental memories back, or to read old newspaper clippings and my memory returns on a gallop. A couple of months ago I got a call from Little Rock wanting to talk about Lou Holtz, who once coached the Razorbacks. “I’ve got the story you wrote right here,” the reporter said. My reply? “Yeah, that was a great story … when can I call you back … I need to look through my notes, so I’ll remember the players who were involved.”

But of everything that went on, I have only one memory awakening as a little boy. And, trust me, that one memory is, to this day, sharper than any razor blade. I even recall there was a burgundy oriental rug running the length of the hall, and a springtime wind was caressing the curtains.

I vividly remember I was only four or five when mother took us over to see the Browns. I never pass that house on Sylvan Drive without recalling walking down a hallway and talking to a beautiful girl who was in an iron lung. Man, fate had dealt her the worst life imaginable. It was worse than a Frankenstein movie. You could hear the iron lung hissing, watch the valves, feel the cold steel … all, to this day … stamped indelibly on my young mind.

Was the daughter’s name Mary Anne … something like that? This was in the early 1950s at the very same time Jonas Salk, the son of uneducated Jewish parents who lived in a New York tenement, fought his way to above his hard scrabble background and devoted his life to the eradication of polio.

* * *

FROM WIKIPEDIA: “The field trial set up to test the Salk vaccine was, according to O'Neill, "the most elaborate program of its kind in history, involving 20,000 physicians and public health officers, 64,000 school personnel, and 220,000 volunteers." Over 1.8 million schoolchildren took part in the trial. Before the Salk vaccine was introduced in 1955, polio was considered one of the most serious public health problems in the world, and epidemics were increasingly devastating in the post-war United States. The 1952 U.S. epidemic, in which 3,145 people died and 21,269 were left with some form of paralysis, was the worst polio outbreak in the nation's history, and most of its victims were children. According to a 2009 PBS documentary, "Apart from the atomic bomb, America's greatest fear was polio."

Wikipedia also included, “News of the vaccine's success was first made public on April 12, 1955. Salk was immediately hailed as a "miracle worker” and chose to not patent the vaccine or seek any profit from it in order to maximize its global distribution. An immediate rush to vaccinate began in both the United States and around the world. Many countries began polio immunization campaigns using Salk's vaccine, including Canada, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, West Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Belgium. Less than 25 years later, domestic transmission of polio had been completely eliminated in the United States.

* * *

According to Forbes news site, had Salk successfully sought and obtained a patent, which he could have easily done, he would have gotten $7 billion, yet that wasn’t what he wanted. He ended a scourge. With no patient restrictions, any world country was welcome to his “dead virus” recipe. Jonas Salk hated the fact he was a world hero. “My only goal was the help humanity.” And I remember, when I was a student at Lookout Mountain Elementary School, standing in line, before a Nurse Ratchet urged me forward. She took a sugar cube, of which I haven’t seen in 20 years, and from a medicine bottle, dripped two droplets of something red into that sugar cube, and told me to gobble it up. “Yes, it will keep you from every being placed it an iron lung …. no, sweetie, you are fine; you don’t need a second helping.”

* * *

THIS FROM USA TODAY ON TUESDAY 12-1-2020:

“Roughly half of American adults remain unwilling to get the (coronavirus) vaccine once it’s available. Consumers need to see execution and implementation before upgrading their economic outlooks” John Leer, Morning Consult economist. (No, cannot wait … the American people need to inoculate fast as possible.)

* * *

FROM THE WASHINGTON POST LAST NIGHT (12-02-2020) -- The United States set a pair of alarming coronavirus records Wednesday, surpassing 200,000 new infections and topping 100,000 COVID-19 patients hospitalized — the first time the country has reached either metric in a single day. And Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said the worst might still be ahead. He predicted that the U.S. COVID-19 death toll could reach 450,000 by February, and he warned that this winter could be “the most difficult time in the public health history of this nation.”

* * *

FROM UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL -- The United States has seen its second-deadliest day of the COVID-19 era, along with 180,000 new cases, according to updated data Wednesday from Johns Hopkins University. The data show there were just under 2,600 coronavirus deaths on Tuesday. The only other day that saw a higher toll was April 15, when 2,607 patients died nationwide.

The new deaths pushed the national toll beyond 270,000 since the pandemic began nearly a year ago, according to Johns Hopkins data. The United States also added about 180,100 cases on Tuesday, the fifth-highest daily count to date. The most deaths Tuesday were seen in Texas, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, according to Worldometer. The U.S. daily average for the past week is 1,500.

There have been 13.73 million coronavirus cases in the United States since the start of the crisis. Hospitalizations also set a record for a fourth day in a row on Tuesday. There are nearly 99,000 patients in hospitals nationwide, according to the COVID Tracking Project. About a fifth are in intensive care.

Make no mistake, my friend. This is real.

Royexum@aol.com

An Emerson iron lung. The patient lies within the chamber, which when sealed provides an effectively oscillating atmospheric pressure. This particular machine was donated to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Museum by the family of poliomyelitis patient Barton Hebert of Covington, Louisiana, who had used the device from the late 1950s until his death in 2003. That’s right, encapsulated for almost 50 years because his breathing was paralyzed. Today there are more modern means, with state-of-the art respirators and such, but Barton Hebert spent every moment for half a century because poliomyelitis came along before Jonas Salk. (Wikipedia photo)
An Emerson iron lung. The patient lies within the chamber, which when sealed provides an effectively oscillating atmospheric pressure. This particular machine was donated to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Museum by the family of poliomyelitis patient Barton Hebert of Covington, Louisiana, who had used the device from the late 1950s until his death in 2003. That’s right, encapsulated for almost 50 years because his breathing was paralyzed. Today there are more modern means, with state-of-the art respirators and such, but Barton Hebert spent every moment for half a century because poliomyelitis came along before Jonas Salk. (Wikipedia photo)
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