"Luckily or Unluckily"

Just ran across this tidbit in the transcript of a 1997 oral history interview with Masatoshi Koshiba (b. 1926), a Japanese physicist who won the Nobel Prize in 2002: 

Koshiba: ...Because my father was an army officer, I was told to enter the military school during the war. Luckily or unluckily, one month before the entrance examination I got polio, which made my right arm numb. It's still numb.

DeVorkin:  But you have full control of it.

Koshiba:  Well, I don't have any strength. That made me exempt from military service during the war.

Later in the interview, Koshiba mentions that he had been fairly athletic, especially at kendo, before he contracted polio and diphtheria at age 13.  Afterwards, he took up building working model airplanes, from bamboo and paper and rubber bands. 

Now here's the odd way I came to this:  I took my daughter to Anime Expo over the weekend, and we went to a panel on kendo.  The expert speaker on the topic, it turned out, was a polio survivor, who took up kendo partly because his martial arts teacher pronounced it "too difficult" for someone with his disabilities.  So, while hearing about kendo, the audience of several hundred (mostly) young anime fans also got some disability memoir too.  I can't find the name of that speaker, but while I was trying to track him down, I came across Professor Koshiba instead.

February 17: Marjorie Lawrence (1907-1979)

Born on this date in 1907, Australian soprano Marjorie Lawrence (show above in her wheelchair, smiling in a hallway for LIFE magazine; a man stands behind the chair; they appear to be dressed for a formal event).

Marjorie Lawrence was a noted performer of Wagner heroines. In 1941, while appearing in an opera in Mexico, she contracted polio. Eighteen months later, after treatment with Sister Elizabeth Kenny, she returned to the stage. Lawrence generally performed in a seated or reclining position thereafter, with creative staging that incorporated her stance into the visuals. The photo below, also from LIFE magazine, is from a performance by Marjorie Lawrence after polio (she played Venus--shell and all!). She taught after she retired in 1952, near her home in Hot Springs, Arkansas, until her death in 1979.
[Visual description: Black-and-white image of about eleven women in costume, on stage; the central woman, Marjorie Lawrence, lounges across a stylized throne-like shell, while the others around her are lounging or standing; there is a man in the foreground, crouching against the front edge of the throne/shell]

October 25: Grace Padaca (b. 1963)

"I am Grace Padaca. I share my story because I know there are many who are like me, not big people, not rich, not strong. I know there are many like me whose strength is inside."

--from a campaign appearance by Grace Padaca

Above: Gracia Cielo "Grace" Magno Padaca, former Governor of Isabela Province in the Philippines, standing on a stage while a group of other people are seated in a row behind her. Padaca was elected governor in 2004, was reelected in 2007, and was defeated in another bid for reelection, earlier this year.

Padaca survived polio in her early childhood, and uses crutches (seen in the photograph above). Padaca was valedictorian of her high school class and graduated with highest honors from college. Before politics, she worked as a radio journalist. In 2008, she won the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Government Service. Today is her 47th birthday.

"Polio" by Staff Benda Bilili

There's an article about a Congolese band in the LA Times today. The band is named Staff Benda Bilili, and they're the subject of a recent documentary, because most of the men in the band are physically disabled. (The print version of the article has more groaningly cliched headlines than the online version. You can probably imagine them.)

They were a street band in Kinshasa when they were discovered. Some of their songs are about disability, including this one, "Polio":




The visuals are of members of the band singing, playing music, and being assisted by groups of children to move their wheelchairs over dirt roads. It's clear that some of their chairs are built from parts of motorcycles, wagons, carts, and bicycles. Some of the scenes also include men using crutches. Some of the daylight scenes are filmed outside a disability assistance center, according to the signage. The notes say that the performance sections of the video were made at the zoo in Kinshasa.

The lyrics aren't in English, but there are English subtitles translating them:

I was born as a strong man but polio crippled me
Look at me today, I'm screwed into my tricycle
I have become the man with the canes
The hell with those crutches!

Parents, please go to the vaccination center
Get your babies vaccinated against polio
Please save them from that curse

My parents had the good idea to register me for school
Look at me now: I'm a well-educated person
which enables me to work and support my family

Parents please don't neglect your children
The one who is disabled is no different from the others
(why should he?)
Treat all your children without discrimination
(don't throw anyone on the side)
Who among them will help you when you're in need?
God only knows who

June 15: Ana Castillo (b. 1953)

[Visual description: book cover for "Peel My Love Like an Onion" by Ana Castillo; a woman's face in flamenco-dancing costume is partly hidden by a fan]

"A friend suggested that I see a doctor, as if a doctor could give me a new leg, another spine, make me fifteen years younger. The doctor sent me to a therapist who then advised me to take a ceramics course at City College to channel all that creative fire burning inside me."

--Carmen Santos, the narrating character in Ana Castillo's Peel My Love Like an Onion (1999)

American novelist Ana Castillo was born on this date in 1953, in Chicago. Her character Carmen "la Coja" Santos or "the cripple" (Carmen la Coja is the Spanish title of the novel) is also born in Chicago in the 1950s, and survives a childhood bout with polio to become a "gimp flamenco dancer." In her forties, a series of setbacks including post-polio symptoms sets the character on a mid-life project of resetting priorities. More here about the "trope of disability" in Castillo's novel and others.

See also:
Suzanne Bost, Encarnación: Illness and Body Politics in Chicana Feminist Literature (Fordham University Press 2009).

Flickr, Australian sopranos, and disability history

Young Marjorie Lawrence, probably as Elsa at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, late 1930's / unknown photographer
Originally uploaded by State Library of New South Wales collection

The State Library of New South Wales recently posted some photos to their "opera" set on Flickr that have relevance to disability history. Above, a portrait of Marjorie Lawrence (1907-1979), taken sometime in the 1930s. She was a noted Australian performer of Wagner heroines (as you can probably imagine from the long blonde tresses and studded headgear here). In 1941, Lawrence contracted polio. Eighteen months later, after treatment with Sister Elizabeth Kenny, she returned to the stage. Lawrence generally performed in a seated or reclining position thereafter, with creative staging that incorporated her stance into the visuals. The photo below (from the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra) is from a performance by Marjorie Lawrence after polio, a year before her retirement in 1952. She taught after that date, until her death in 1979.

[Visual description: Marjorie Larence in Egyptian costume, being carried on a throne by eight young men also in costume]

Florence Austral's photo (right; she's shown making marmalade in 1953, for some reason) has also recently appeared in the same flickrstream. Austral (1892-1968) was another Australian soprano who specialized in Wagnerian roles. She was very well known and had toured much of the world with her work when she began to experience the symptoms of multiple sclerosis (MS) in 1930. She continued to perform, moving gradually away from operas and into concerts and recitals, before her retirement in 1940. She, too, taught singing after she stopped performing, in Austral's case at the Newcastle Conservatorium from 1954-1959. Austral died in 1968.

Did Austral and Lawrence known one another? Did they compare notes on their efforts to maintain a performing career through the realities of a diagnosis that's both public and significant? I don't know enough about opera history or Australian women's history to know the answer. But maybe there's an article in this, for someone who can follow up.

Michael Chabon, "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay"

An early passage of Michael Chabon's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000) caught my attention today:

Thirteen-year-old title character Sammy Clay and his estranged father, a vaudeville performer called "the Mighty Molecule," but born Alter Klayman near Minsk, are talking in a hammam in Brooklyn in the 1930s, reminiscing about Sammy's earlier bout with polio:

"You were so heavy to carry," his father said, "I thought you have to be dead. Only also you were so hot against the hand. The doctor came and we put ice on you and when you woke up you couldn't walk anymore. And then when you come back from the hospital I started taking you and I took you around, I carried you and I dragged you and I made you walk. Until your knees were scraped and bruised, I made you walk. Until you cried. First holding on to me, then on to the crutches, then not with crutches. All by yourself."
"Jeez," Sammy said. "I mean, huh. Mom never told me any of this."
"What a wonder."
"I honestly don't remember."
"God is merciful," the Molecule said drily; he didn't believe in God, as his son well knew. "You hated every minute. You just as good hated me."
"But Mom lied."
"I am shocked."
"She always told me you left when I was just a little baby."
"I did. But I came back. I am there when you come sick. Then I stay and teach you to help you walk."
"And then you left again."
The Molecule appeared to choose to ignore this observation. "That's why I try to walk you around so much now," he said. "To make your legs strong."
This possible second motive for their walks--after his father's inherent restlessness--had occurred to Sammy before. He was flattered, and believed his father, and in the potency of long walks. (106-107)

May 8: Douglas A. Martin (1947-2003)

May 8 was the birthday of Douglas A. Martin, a leader of the disability rights movement in Los Angeles in the early 1970s, active in Californians for Strong Access, and co-founder and director of the Westside Center for Independent Living in 1975. In 1971, he was the first grad student with a "significant disability" to win a UCLA Chancellor's Fellowship--and the next year he was UCLA's first disabled teaching assistant. He earned a PhD in urban studies at UCLA. Martin co-founded the Chancellor's Advisory Committee on Disability in 1983, and was a Special Assistant to the Chancellor to coordinate ADA and 504 compliance on campus. On the national level, he lobbied tirelessly to remove work penalties from Social Security provisions. Martin died way too soon, in 2003, at age 55.

There's a really good, long, interesting oral history interview with Douglas Martin, conducted in 2002 by Sharon Bonney, available in transcript at the Bancroft Library website. (There are also audio and video clips. This might be limited access, I'm not sure.) One section that particularly caught my eye was about his three years in an Omaha hospital after contracting polio at age 5; television was new then, and a great distraction for a ward full of children in iron lungs. But the Army-McCarthy hearings were running on the only channel for much of the day! Martin remembers that planting a seed:

It just really gave me a sense of, there's a whole big wide world out there going on, and you know this political world and all this stuff. It was interesting. Didn't have that much to do with it at that point except take it all in. But later I guess, it might have been part of the reason I was interested in politics, and getting involved in Washington, and kind of having knowledge. There was so much information and detail about the system, and how it worked and how it didn't work, in those days. Some of the best and some of the worst in people in politics came out. It was fascinating, and I guess I got interested, I saw it to be a place where you could make a difference. I kind of filed it away in the back of my mind. I kind of remember that as possibly motivating, as some basis for later interest in trying to bring about social change, something more positive. (here)

I don't watch TV if I can help it when I'm in the hospital. When my kid is hospitalized, it's usually in a shared room, and there's little choice. I remember being in a quad isolation room with him during the 1998 Clinton impeachment hearings; the mother across the room was shouting at the commentators a lot. Think I also saw an Olympics opening festivities in a PICU once? I know another mother whose son was born in July 1969--so she and the other women giving birth that week were among the Americans who did not see the Neil Armstrong moon landing live.

What have you seen--or not seen--on TV during hospital stays?

July 16: Dorothy Cottrell (1902-1957)

Certainly I would like to be able to walk, but if the good fairy of old stories offered me the one gift, the ability to walk would not be the thing I would ask for. More years with my husband than I may normally expect, the ability to write better--a dozen things--would come before it.

--Dorothy Cottrell

Ever heard of this Australian writer? I hadn't, but she was born 105 years ago today. She used a wheelchair from age 6, after surviving polio.

Cottrell's life story reads like some of the adventures and children's tales she would later write: as a little girl on her uncle's sheep farm near Toowoomba, she taught the sheep and working dogs to pull her wheelchair like a chariot. She also learned to shoot a hunting rifle, and swim, and drive a car. At 20 she married, secretly, and traveled with her bookkeeper husband around Australia. In 1928 the Cottrells moved to California, and in 1942 to Florida. Dorothy wrote popular fiction, which funded her travels, and some of her books were made into movies. It is said that she would hop a ride on any ship that would accept her with her chair, and thus made her way around the Caribbean she loved.

This month, the rare books collection at the Monash University Library has a display on Australian Women Writers, 1900-1950, and Cottrell is among the featured authors.

New Memoir: Anne Finger, "Elegy for a Disease"

While polio is a physical experience, it is also a social one…. Polio does not belong just to those of us who were infected by it, but to our mothers and fathers, our sisters and brothers, our partners and our children; to those who cared for us, to those who brutalized us (often not mutually exclusive categories); to those who saw us as palimpsests [tablets] on which to write their fear, their pity, their admiration, their empathy, their discomfort.

--Anne Finger, from the online version of the Smithsonian's exhibit "Whatever Happened to Polio?"

If you enjoyed Anne Finger's earlier book, Past Due: A Story of Disability, Pregnancy, and Birth (Seal Press 1990), or her disability-themed novel Bone Truth (Coffeehouse Press 1994), you'll want to check out her new memoir, Elegy for a Disease: A Personal and Cultural History of Polio (St. Martin's Press 2006), just out.