Polio Pandemic Memories from 94-Year-Old Carmen Bossenbrock

Bossenbrock looks back at her work with Dr. Ed Cadman combating the effects of the Polio virus in North Central Washington

Carmen Bossenbrock was born in 1928 at the Deaconess Hospital in Wenatchee. Later in her life, she worked at that same hospital as a physical therapist during the 1953 polio epidemic.

For a time, she was the only physical therapist serving an area of the state larger than the state of Maryland.

“For a while, I was the only physical therapist between Seattle and Spokane and the Canadian border,” she said. “And I was working so hard because I was the only therapist.”

She worked closely with Dr. Ed Cadman, a Wenatchee-based physician who gained international fame for his fight against polio as the president of Rotary International.

Here’s a video of Carmen talking about her experience working with polio patients and Dr. Cadman.

Fun fact: those pear trees at the beginning of the video were planted by Carmen’s father way back in 1909, and they’re still producing fruit. That makes them two of the oldest still-producing fruit trees in the Wenatchee Valley.

It was a pleasure producing this video for the Rotary District 5060 Convention, which took place this month in Wenatchee. I want to thank fellow Rotarian Pete Van Well for arranging this interview for me and helping conduct it.

I think it’s important to listen to the stories of older adults like Carmen because they lived the history that many of us only read about in books. They can offer us more insight and context into recent history and help us understand what people were thinking and feeling during turbulent times, like the polio pandemic of the 40s and 50s.

As we work to put the current pandemic in our rear view and mourn the deaths of more than one million fellow Americans due to Covid-19, I think we can learn a lot from folks who lived and worked through past pandemics.

From time to time, throughout the current pandemic, I felt grateful the Covid virus didn’t affect children as Polio did. But you also can’t help but wonder: if Covid disfigured and killed our children as Polio did, would we have taken it more seriously? Would we have allowed it to become a political football?

There’s no way to know.

But I do know I want to do more of these interviews with senior citizens in the future and build a library of interesting interviews for posterity. So if you know someone with an interesting story, I’d like to learn more.

If you’d like to watch an older video featuring an interview with Dr. Cadman, you can do that here.