Farewell to a Friend

Yesterday, we found out that a good friend of ours, Bill Bennett, died recently at age 76. I say “good friend” even though I only met him a couple of times. His wife, Mary, taught with Kathleen years ago, in the Chicago suburbs, and those two have kept in touch ever since. About 20 years ago, we spent an engaging weekend with them in their summer home in Wisconsin, and I was immediately charmed by both people. Bill and I hit it off right away, as we both taught history and shared an unrequited love for the Chicago Cubs. They were also an interesting couple who loved conversations on literature, politics, history, and culture. Mary had been a nun before giving up her vows, and they spent many happy years together as a married couple.

One of Bill’s favorite historical figures was Teddy Roosevelt, and Mary included several TR quotes on the prayer card that people received at Bill’s memorial service. The first quote speaks to the situation in the U.S. today: “This country will never be a good place for any of us to live in unless we make it a good place for all of us to live in.” Another one came shortly after Teddy was shot in the chest while giving a campaign speech in Milwaukee in 1912. The bullet stopped just a fraction of an inch from his heart, and he was bleeding profusely from the wound. Being Teddy, however, he insisted on giving the rest of his two-hour-long speech before obtaining medical attention. Asked about it afterward, he said, “I don’t always get shot during the middle of a speech, but when I do, I finish the damn speech.”

Another thing you should know about Bill is that he was one of the last people in this country to contract polio. He got the disease as a child and suffered from a deformed leg that caused him to limp badly for the rest of his life. Before the 1950s, polio was a terrible and deadly disease. In 1952 alone, there were 58,000 reported cases in the U.S., and the mere mention of the disease terrified people like my mother. In 1955, when I was a year old, Jonas Salk developed a polio vaccine. At first, the vaccine was delivered by way of a painful inoculation. Almost everyone my age bears a scar on their arm from those shots. In the late ‘fifties, an oral vaccine was developed, eliminating the need for those shots. So successful were those vaccinations that the Americas were declared polio free in 1994. In 2018, there were only about 100 cases of polio worldwide. In short, childhood vaccinations had virtually eradicated polio from the face of the Earth.

Another of the great achievements of the scientific age was the invention of a vaccine for measles in 1963. Before that, about 2.6 million people died annually from the highly infectious disease. I had measles as a child, at the same time that my sister and brother had it. We were lucky and recovered after being seriously sick for a while. Shortly after that, the measles vaccine was developed and children were required to have it before entering school. Because of another miracle drug, then, a major disease was declared officially eradicated in the U.S. by the year 2000. Today, however, measles is back and spreading once again. How can this be? To quote an article in Forbes magazine from earlier this year, “The primary reason is simple: it’s the highly vocal, supremely confident, and utterly misinformed anti-vaccine movement.” The “anti-vaxxers,” as they are called, started raising fears about the inoculations some 20 years ago and they have been gaining followers ever since. Like so many other conspiracy theorists and purveyors of misinformation, they continue to spread their ideas via social media despite mountains of evidence that the vaccinations are both safe and necessary. These nut-cases have been successful in convincing people that measles vaccinations do more harm than good. Now fearful parents are refusing to have their children vaccinated, and the disease is on the rise again. Just this morning, I read a story in the newspaper that explained how measles is spreading rapidly, and children are dying around the world because of the anti-vax movement. These are not just ignorant, anti-government sorts who are doing this—although there are some parents who fall into this category. Instead, they are usually educated people from both the left and right wings of the political spectrum. I just don’t get it.

Okay. I’m down from my soapbox, so I’ll leave you with this. Last night, Kathleen and I drank a toast to our friend Bill. As I thought of him, I remembered one of my favorite stories about Theodore Roosevelt. Teddy was attending the wedding of his niece. His daughter, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, who was a clever personality in her own right, was watching him hold court at the bar. As the former president regaled his audience with stories about chasing outlaws in the Badlands and charging up San Juan Hill with the Rough Riders, the bride and groom sat in a corner by themselves, completely ignored by their wedding guests. “That’s my father,” she remarked to a friend. “He wants to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral.”

Bill would have liked that story. He also would have enjoyed the fact that Teddy’s niece was named Eleanor Roosevelt, and the groom was her fifth cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. (She didn’t even have to change her last name when they married.)

FDR, of course, contracted polio a few years later and spent the rest of his life confined to a wheelchair.