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Grades One to Five ( 2)

Submitted by Ken Watts on Mon, 02/11/2008 - 10:42

WE HAD A GRAPE ARBOR as part of the garden.

In the summer, when the grapes were ripe, I used to go sit under the arbor and reach up among the leaves and get handfuls of those luscious sweet grapes.

There isn't anything much better tasting than the nectar from a cool vine ripened grape. You place a grape into your mouth, pop the fleshy inner portion out and then squeeze the last drop of sweet nectar from the hull before spitting it out.

The ecstasy of that taste demands the procedure be repeated over and over.

I had been performing the above procedure the year I entered second grade when one day I became ill.

The illness persisted, so my parents took me to a local doctor. He attributed my illness to the fact that I probably had included too many grapes that weren't completely ripe.

Our next door neighbor on the South (Jimmy Catterson) had a son who was a doctor in Oskaloosa (the next town South of New Sharon on US highway 63). His specialty was children.

Dr. Roy Catterson came home to visit his Parents quite often. So, when my illness persisted my parents asked him to examine me. He immediately diagnosed the problem as Polio (which was then referred to as infantile paralysis).

He recommended that I be placed in the hospital immediately.

I remember riding in his car with my mother on the way to Mercy Hospital in Oskaloosa late at night. The road from New Sharon to Oskaloosa was just a gravel road at that time. I thought it was really a fancy and quiet running automobile.

I don't know what year model the car was - but it was a Chevrolet Coupe and was probably a 1930 or 1931 model since I was in the second grade and didn't start to school until I was six because my birthday came too late in the fall.