Posing en famille, circa June, 1950, for the local (Birmingham, England) newspaper, The Birmingham Post
Click on the picture below to see a more recent shot
taken Feb 15, 1989, when the family gathered for my mother's 80th birthday

Back row: Mary, Margaret, Gerard, and Anthony
Next row (sitting in front of Mary and Margaret): Josephine and Michael
Standing next to the piano: Barbara
Sitting in a line in front of Josephine and Michael: Teresa, Imelda, Bernard (me), and Francis
In mom's arms: Andrew

I was six, going on seven, years of age when this picture was taken.  The year before, in early June, 1949, I woke up one morning feeling very thirsty. I made my way down the stairs from the boys' "big attic" bedroom to the single in-house bathroom on the second floor, where I tried to bend down to drink water from the tap (faucet) in the sink.  I couldn't bend my back.

"That's odd," I remember thinking.  I walked out of the bathroom, onto the landing at the top of the stairs leading down to the ground floor.  My next thought was: "Hmmmm, this might be a good excuse to skip school..."

As it happened, my dad was just then coming up the stairs and I blurted out to him: "Daddy, I can't bend my back!"  Next thing I remember, I was in a hospital bed at the Birmingham (England) Orthopaedic Hospital on Hagley Rd.  Somewhere, somehow, I had contracted polio; every parent at the time was deathly afraid that a child of theirs would catch the virus that, year after year, laid low city children who came out to play in the summer months.

I was in the hospital's isolation unit for ten weeks till the virus ran its course.  There was no cure at that time; Dr. Jonas Salk's vaccine, developed in the 1950s at the University of Pittsburgh, USA (where, ironically, I eventually ended up as a professor in the department of Computer Science) was only available after 1955. I was brought home from the hospital on my 6th birthday, August 17, 1949.

As you can see from the above photo, the muscles in my left leg had not yet atrophied to the point of showing any noticeable difference from those in my right leg.  But by my late teenage years the difference was striking, the left leg ending up 1.5" shorter than the right, with next to no muscle tissue at all, and the right leg--to compensate for the weakness in the left--had developed powerful musculature which remains the case to this day.

I'm right-handed for most everything I do--writing, playing tennis or darts, drinking a pint or a cup of tea, and so on.  But I'm left-handed when it comes to any activity, especially sports, in which I need to use both hands --sports such as cricket, golf, baseball, rounders, and activities such as using a broom.  I always want to lead off my right leg, which is the case if I go about a two-hands activity left-handed.  Until about 7 years ago I thought this had to be because polio had made my left leg useless.  I can't balance on my left leg at all; it's very difficult for me to plant my foot flat on the ground (my left foot is also 1.5" shorter than the right and can't flex at the ankle). Anyway, it just seemed to me that this was a good reason why, when I took up two-handed sports, perhaps after the age of 6, I instinctively did so left-handed.

But seven years ago, when I stayed with my sister, Imelda, for five weeks in Albania, I discovered that she, too, was left-handed when using both hands to swing a bat or a club or a broom, and right-handed for everything else.  Then, a couple of years later, when my brother, Andrew, stayed with us in Florida while building a house in Fort Myers, I discovered that he, too, was left-handed for two-handed sports, but right-handed for everything else.  I also have two brothers and a sister who are more or less completely left-handed.

So perhaps my propensity for left-handedness has nothing to do with polio at all!

©Bernie Poole, 1996-2015 / poole@pitt.edu / (724) 244-4939 / Revised January 2, 2015 / All rights reserved