The Case of John Kidder

It was going to be a quiet vacation for John Faus Kidder and his family. John Kidder, a 31-year-old supervisor in a Du Pont fabric plant, spent the first few days close to his home in Fairfield, Conn., lazing on the beach and playing golf. He washed and waxed the car. Then his wife and three children piled into it for the drive up the Hudson River valley to Troy, where they were going to spend a week with his parents. On the way, they stopped at Hyde Park and saw the grave of the nation's most famed polio victim. It was the polio season, but the Kidders felt only the vague concern that all parents have for their youngsters.

After a night's sleep in Troy, the children were as lively as ever, but John Kidder had the sniffles and a splitting headache. Another day showed weakness in his right arm. John Kidder walked into a hospital and was put to bed. Since that day in June of 1951, he has never been able to get out of bed unaided. Polio, which is yearly taking a higher toll of adults, had spared the Kidder children but struck the father. As he puts it: "From active good health I was transformed in two short days into a motionless hulk."

Weaned from the Lung. Last week Kidder was back in the little Montana town of Ronan (pop. 1,251), where he grew up. He had spent 54 days (most of them in an iron lung) in the Troy hospital, then 14 months at the Mary MacArthur Center in Massachusetts, where he was "weaned" from the lung and introduced to a rocking bed. This device, with an adjustable top like a hospital bed, has a motor which makes it rock in teetertotter style. As the bed head rises, the weight of the abdominal organs pulls down the patient's diaphragm. This expands his chest cavity, which his paralyzed muscles can no longer do, and pulls air into the lungs. When the foot of the bed rises, the abdominal organs press against the diaphragm and expel air.

Though John Kidder was earning a better-than-average salary, he could not have paid more than a fraction of the cost of his care. The Fairfield County chapter of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis and the national headquarters footed the bills. When it was clear that Kidder would never work at his old job again, his wife sold the Fairfield house and the car and got ready to move in with her father, Ronan's Postmaster Knute Johnson

Airlift, Fork-Lift. The Kidders helped to pay for a two-room addition to the Johnson house. Barbara Johnson Kidder had learned at the Mary MacArthur Center how to care for her husband. Last fall, everything was set. The National Foundation shipped out a rocking bed, a wheelchair, an iron lung, a portable respirator and oddments of other equipment. It arranged with the Military Air Transport Service to fly Kidder west. He made the trip in an iron lung (by a roundabout scenic route), with MATS supplying a forklift to heft him in & out of the plane's extra-wide doors.

John Kidder is almost completely paralyzed. He can move only his head and neck, and exert pressure with his right leg and foot. So the bottom of the rocking bed has a button switch that he presses with his toe to stop the motion, e.g., when the kids are playing in the room and a ball rolls underneath, and restart it. There is also a bulb-type air horn which squawks like a duck when he presses it to summon attention.

Mrs. Kidder is training friendly nurses and family members to take care of John so that they can spell her for a few hours. The children--Susan, 9, Bruce, 7, and Tommy, 2--run in & out of their father's room with their friends, as naturally as if his illness was nothing unusual.

But John Kidder is not deceiving himself. He knows that medical science has no prospect of being able to make him well. He is simply determined to enjoy his life as he must live it. Usually he passes the day on the rocking bed, but he often gets into his wheelchair for family dinner. He reads a lot and has been given an automatic page turner. Once a week, four men come in for bridge. (It takes an extra man to handle Kidder's cards.) If the weather is good, he can go for a ride, wearing his portable respirator.

And each week, by dictating to his wife, John Kidder does a column ("Sittin' and Rockin' ") for the Ronan Pioneer (circ. 1,425). This month, appealing for contributions to the March of Dimes, Columnist Kidder recalled his doctor's reassuring words early in his own illness: "Don't worry about the hospital expense, John--the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis will take care of it." It has. So far, in the care of John Kidder, the foundation and its chapters have expended at least 140,000 dimes.

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