License plate was like scarlet letter

It was sometime during the 1980s, and my wife and I were at some sort of state gathering.

There were a handful of political types present, but no big names.

One of those was a fellow by the name of Bruce VanNatta.

He was at the time, as I recall, head of the Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles but was rumored to have higher political aspirations.

Somehow we struck up a conversation, and he asked where we were from.

“Portland,” he said. “LA.”

That was the first two letters on license plates issued to Portland residents back in the 1950s. As I recall, both Dunkirk and Redkey had different letters on their plates.

“Jay County,” said VanNatta.

And his story began.

When he was a teenager, he told us, he was a Red Cross volunteer during the summer of 1949. He worked for a period of weeks during the polio epidemic that swept the county that year, helping out at the makeshift hospital annex at the American Legion Post.

One weekend, he told us, some of the guys who had volunteered decided to go looking for some fun. Jay County had been officially shut down by the county health department under terms far stricter than those in place today.

One of the Portland guys had a car, he told us. The group piled in, headed out of town and out of the county. There was a street fair in progress about 45 minutes away, and the midway — and the girls — beckoned.

But not for long.

No sooner had they parked the car than the LA on the license plate was spotted.

And the locals at the street fair made it instantly and abundantly clear that the guys should get back in the car and head back where they came from.

That story came back to me when Chris Schanz of The CR’s staff took a look back at the local polio epidemic of 1949.

It came back to me in 1999 when the newspaper staff did a detailed series on the 50th anniversary of the epidemic.

The title of that series was “Summer of Fear.”

And that fit.

Like COVID-19, polio was a mystery back then. No one knew how it was transmitted. No one knew what caused it. It just struck.

Unlike COVID-19, its primary targets were the young. Kids. Infants. Toddlers. High school students.

So the fear that summer was visceral, and running a bunch of teenagers out of town because of the LA on their license plate was understandable.

The good news is that Jay County’s polio epidemic played itself out. There were a few terrifying months, but then it disappeared as mysteriously as it had arrived.

The better news is that within several years a vaccine was readily available. Kids who had been infants during the epidemic got their shots in grade school.

There were scars, of course.

Ask around among those in their late 70s and you’ll hear the stories.

The late Dr. Eugene Gillum used to say that if you parked across the street from a post office in Jay County and waited 20 or 30 minutes and you knew what to look for, you would see someone who had survived polio. There might be a hitch in their walk. They might take the steps more carefully. But to the medically trained eye, the evidence was there.

Today we are in the middle of something that historians will be writing about for generations. No one knows how it’s going to play out. Everyone hopes for the best, but fear and uncertainty are our daily bread.

There will be scars on the nation when this has passed. That much we know.

But the wounds will heal. That much we believe.