One Saturday morning when I was in the second grade, my mom and dad took me and my brother down to Calhoun-Clemson Elementary School for a medical treatment that seemed almost like magic.

The long tables inside the lunchroom, instead of being laden with Mrs. Galloway’s legendary yeast rolls and the other cafeteria fare we were used to seeing, were lined with rows of little paper cups, each one with a sugar cube that had a drop of pink medicine in it.

Somehow, eating one of those sugar cubes, we were told, would keep us from getting polio, a terrible disease that crippled children.

I think that was the first time I ever heard the word “vaccine.”

This was around the same time that John Glenn climbed into a tiny space capsule named Friendship 7 and circled

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