Before Polio Plus, before Sabin, before Salk, there was Basil O'Connor. The scrappy son of an Irish immigrant in Massachusetts, he began selling newspapers at age 10, quickly organizing a monopoly of the best routes. He played fiddle in a local dance band to earn money for college. After graduating from law school, he struck up a friendship and then a law partnership with Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The rest is history.
Roosevelt asked O'Connor to head up his Georgia Warm Springs Foundation, dedicated to providing therapy for polio victims. That foundation morphed into the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis during the FDR presidency, and O'Connor remained at the helm. Philanthropy was hard to attract during the Depression, but O'Connor came up with the wildly successful idea of a March of Dimes, revolutionizing fundraising in America.
O'Connor believed that the most important use of that funding was on research to develop a polio vaccine. Albert Sabin was toiling away on developing and testing a live virus polio vaccine, but Jonas Salk believed that a "killed virus" approach could also work. The scientific community were skeptical of the killed virus method and supported Sabin's approach. O'Connor put the Foundation's money on Salk's horse. He won. We won. Polio lost. By the time Sabin's vaccine became available in 1960, polio had been nearly eliminated in the United States.
Interestingly, even before Polio Plus, Rotary clubs throughout the United States were supporting the same cause O'Connor was. That support started as early as 1912 with local clubs' work for "crippled children," and by 1955 it was widespread. At the Rotary International Convention in 1955, the year the Salk vaccine was first provided nationwide, the organization received the "March of Dimes Award of Gratitude." It reads, in part: "[Your] conscientious devotion to the common goal of victory over polio has brought help and hope to the afflicted and has given impetus to a new era of scientific accomplishment in which the ultimate conquest of polio seems assured."
It was signed by ... Basil O'Connor, of course.