Balancing Act
She lived through polio, the Great Depression and the civil rights movement. She has some advice for living through coronavirus pandemic
Wanda Bridgeforth was 16 when a polio outbreak swept through Chicago in 1937. Schools were closed. Kids learned their lessons through 15-minute segments on participating radio stations.
“I was at the age where I didn’t have the good sense to be scared,” Bridgeforth told me last week. “When you’re 16, 17 years old, you know everything.”
A good friend of hers contracted the virus, which affected the nervous system and caused paralysis and death by the tens of thousands before a vaccine was developed.
“Racism raised its ugly head,” Bridgeforth said. “She was hospitalized here in South Shore and they put her in the basement. She was not on the ward with the white kids. That was traumatic, and it was upsetting to all of us.”
Her friend survived and lived to be 80. She walked with a limp.
Sixteen years after that outbreak, on March 26, 1953, Jonas Salk announced a successful vaccine against polio, but the disease had been on a deadly rampage up to that point.
Bridgeforth was married with a daughter, also named Wanda, by the time the vaccine was available. She remembers worrying that her daughter would catch polio in 1952, a particularly bad year for the virus — close to 58,000 new cases were recorded that year, according to Post-Polio Health International.
“It was quite something,” Bridgeforth said. “I remember they closed all the beaches.”
She knew a few people who contracted the virus — the childhood friend consigned to the hospital basement, a few people from the neighborhood. No one she knew died from it, and her family escaped unharmed.
Now Bridgeforth, 98, and her daughter, 77, both find themselves living through another epidemic. (Bridgeforth’s husband passed in 1977.)
“I have more at stake with this virus,” Bridgeforth told me. “I have my daughter. I have my grandchildren.”
They all live in Chicago, Bridgeforth’s home since she was 3, just a few miles apart from each other. Bridgeforth lives alone in a Hyde Park condo, not far from Lake Michigan.
“I am the vice president in charge of looking out
“I’m not Pollyanna, but find something to be happy about. Or if not happy, contented. I feel a lot of times while you’re out there struggling to find something great, something else comes along and you miss it because you’re so busy looking at the end, at the finish.”
—Wanda Bridgeforth
the window,” she said. “My job is practicing the lively art of doing nothing. And that takes some doing! It might be a form of meditation, I don’t know.”
I read about Bridgeforth in “Writing Out Loud,” Beth Finke’s memoir about teaching writing classes to Chicago senior citizens. Bridgeforth, Finke confided in me last summer, is her favorite student.
“Wanda brings a slice of Chicago history with her,” Finke said at the time.
Bridgeforth was part of the first class of freshmen at all-black DuSable High School when it opened in Bronzeville in 1935. She knew Nat King Cole when he was just Nat Cole. She knew Dinah Washington as Ruth Jones and Redd Foxx as John Sanford. They were all her classmates at DuSable.
She lived through the Great Depression and World War II and the civil rights movement. She writes beautifully about much of it in the essays she writes for Finke’s classes, several of which are excerpted in Finke’s book.
I asked Bridgeforth if I could interview her last week. I’m hungry for perspective on this moment in history, this pandemic, this time of forced separation and unknowable outcomes. She obliged.
She has known great hardship. Her dad, a chemist, moved around the country trying to find work during the Great Depression. Her mom worked as a maid “in family,” which meant living in the home where she kept house. Bridgeforth was left to bounce from home to home.
“Family, friends, whatever,” she said. “I didn’t live anywhere for long. I guess about six months was my limit.”
Her Uncle Larry and Aunt Gert’s house was one of her first and most memorable stops. There were 19 people living in that six-bedroom apartment in Bronzeville. Bridgeforth and her cousins slept on roll-away cots in the dining room.
“We ate in that room, did homework at the table, played cards there and slept there,” she writes in an essay excerpted in Finke’s book.
Aunt Gert formed “committees” and Bridgeforth was on the committee to churn the ice cream. After dinner, Aunt Gert would sit in the corner and play guitar while the kids would spread wax on their stocking feet and dance and slide around and wax the floor.
“We would make so much noise that others in the building knew it was time to join us,” Bridgeforth writes. “Nobody reported us for being too noisy because they were all involved.”
But she didn’t get to stay there long. Bridgeforth estimates she’s moved 40 times in her life.
“When you’re going through something, you’re so busy going through it, you don’t have time to worry about whether it’s hard or easy,” she told me.
The joyful parts of her life stand out more than the struggles, she said.
Playing tennis in the street after school. “We pulled a net across the street and if you heard an automobile coming, you picked up the net and took it to the side,” she said. “Then you put it back up and continued to play.”
Jumping rope while the grown-ups headed to work. “We watched all the women wearing their high heels to go work at Marshall Field’s and we’d say, ‘Two, four, six, eight, how much money do they make?’ Kids would think you were crazy if you started playing jump rope like that now.”
Walking to school with all the neighborhood kids. “We would start at Cottage Grove and walk to 49th and Wabash and pick up somebody at each corner,” she said. “By the time we got to school we had a whole crowd.”
Bridgeforth studied at DuSable under music instructor Walter Dyett, who taught and shaped such jazz greats as Von Freeman. She performed in several of Dyett’s annual “Hi-Jinks” shows, which drew enormous crowds.
“That was the highlight of your life if you were
selected to be in the show,” Bridgeforth said. “One year we danced to the Danube waltz and we came down from the ceiling in slings and the boys were standing there in their full dress outfits with cutaway coats. It was gorgeous. It was just gorgeous.”
I asked Bridgeforth for some advice. For those of us worried about where we’re headed and what we’re losing and what sort of impressions (scars?) this will all leave on our kids. Slow down, she said.
“Be observant about the things that are going on around you,” she said. “You don’t have to do great things.”
A good life doesn’t have to mean a life free of hardships, she said.
“I’m going to tell you, I have enjoyed my life,” she said. “Sometimes it was hell on foot, but I enjoyed it. I’ve had good friends and a good family, a loving family.”
She encouraged me to read “My Thirty Years Backstairs at the White House.” The author, Lillian Parks, was a White House maid beginning in the Hoover administration and spent much of her childhood in the White House as the daughter of Maggie Rogers, another White House maid. Parks had polio at age 6 and used a crutch. Bridgeforth was touched by a moment in the book when President Franklin D. Roosevelt makes an exception to the rule barring domestic help from using the White House elevator and declares “Little Lillian” be allowed to ride it instead of climbing the stairs.
Bridgeforth loves stories.
She knows we’re living in the middle of one, and there’s some risk in worrying too much about how it ends.
“I’m not Pollyanna, but find something to be happy about,” she said. “Or if not happy, contented. I feel a lot of times while you’re out there struggling to find something great, something else comes along and you miss it because you’re so busy looking at the end, at the finish.”
“If you knew my life story,” she said, “it was really rough. But I do with what I’ve got. You find the humor in things. I’m not talking about big laughs, the bellywhoppers and the knee slappers. But there is humor, and I think that’s what gets you through.”
It’s not a cure. It doesn’t cancel out the hardship or the grieving or the fear. But joy and humor and art and play can exist alongside the sorrow, and it helps to hear someone who’s known and seen plenty remind us of that.
Thank you, Wanda Bridgeforth. Your words will help shape the way I remember this story.