Former polio patients Linda Hull (left) and Brenda Taplin look at a photo of Taplin's granddaughter during the reunion. NOPPADOL PAOTHONG / NEWS-LEADER

L. Taplin Nurse Jane Dillard works with an unknown boy and Brenda Taplin at Burge Hospital on Christmas Day 1951. Dillard and her husband, Erin Dillard, a surgeon, both worked in the polio ward at Burge. BRENDA TAPLIN FAMILY PHOTO

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"It's so good to see you, Jody," she said to Jody Ray of Shell Knob, a fellow patient in the Burge Hospital polio ward in 1951 and '52. "I've seen your picture for so long; it's good to see you in person!"

Taplin and Ray were the "babies" of the unit, he around 2 years old when he went in and Taplin 15 months. They were repeatedly depicted in the half-century-old newspaper clippings displayed Saturday at the first Burge Hospital Polio Patients' Reunion at Bolivar's Smith Restaurant.

In 1949, the Burge polio isolation unit was set up next to Burge Hospital at 1415 N. Jefferson Ave. in Springfield. It housed 15 patients in each of its two floors and was called Polio Cottage, according to an online history of the hospital, which was to become Cox North hospital.

Back then, polio crippled thousands of American children every year. Only in 1955 when Jonas Salk's polio vaccine was approved for use did the threat subside, and it wasn't eliminated from the Americas for another 40 years, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Neither Taplin nor Ray remember much about their time being cared for in barracks loaned from the O'Reilly Hospital site.

"All I remember is the swush sound of the iron lungs," says Taplin, a Missouri State University business graduate who had to leave her job when her post-polio syndrome depleted her energy two years ago.

"Every once in awhile I'll remember something," Ray, who was in one of the iron lungs, says. But the memories are fleeting for the cost accountant and minister. That's pretty much a godsend, the survivors agree.

One who remembers Ray is Linda Holmgren Hull, a few years older than he.

"He would lie in the crib and pull his feet up behind his ears," remembers Hull, formerly of Greenfield and now lives in Independence. "His eyes look just the same."

Hull organized the reunion, finding fellow patients on the Internet with the help of her mother's memory for the children's names. "With some of the girls, Mama remembered where they were from, and I just called people in that area with that last name until I found 'em."

The number of Burge alumni who have also suffered post polio syndrome, new symptoms hitting them years after their initial bout, is staggering. Almost everyone questioned at the reunion has.

Only Judy St. Clair Hicks of Chadwick, who was in the ward for only four months, isn't sure. "I remember growing up, I had lots of leg aches," she says.

"Mine's in my good arm and leg," says Hull, shrugging. "Not the ones that were affected by polio."

Survivor Virginia Wood of Springfield has had to deal with the reoccurences. "They didn't recognize what was wrong," Wood explained. "They thought once you had polio, that was it. It took them a long time to diagnose it."

Wood recovered from her childhood bout well enough to be able to later get her nursing degree at Burge School of Nursing. She was a student when a second polio siege hit in 1959 and '60. Then in 1975, while she was a staff nurse at the Zenith factory here, post polio syndrome rendered her unable to work. "I had to quit," she says. "They told me to sit or lie for six months — I almost lost my mind."

As they eat and visit in Bolivar, the survivors and their relatives reminisce about others who are not at the reunion. Taplin's mother Leola, looks at a photo of a very thin boy who died.

"Charlie, do you remember Barry Greenwade?" she asks her husband. "When we'd visit, he'd always say, 'Charlie, would you turn my head to the right or left.'" Her husband, with whom she owned Taplin's Drive-In on Central Street for years, nods slowly.

Hicks, put into the unit in 1951 when she was 3, laughs as she remembers her mother "breaking into" the polio ward. "It was stormy one night and Mom was worried about it," she says.

"I could just hear her in my mind, crying," Agnes St. Clair, also of Chadwick, recalls.