 |
Shown left to right: 1947 "March of Dimes" Poster Girl
Nancy Drury, Seymour Kneitel holding 4 1/2 year old son Kenny. Far right
is Ken's grand-dad Max Fleischer. Taken in the Polio Ward of Knickerbocher
Hospital, N.Y.C. Note the poster of Popeye on the back wall.
My dad loved his work… he loved to draw and he’d laugh
hysterically at a good ‘gag.’ So it would seem that every day he’d go off to
work wonderfully happy. Often he did. But like any other kind of show biz… the
show had to go on and the business of animation had to go forward no matter
what difficult times might be happening in your personal life.
Our family was greatly impacted—as so many others were—by
the terrible polio epidemic that peaked in the 1940’s and 50’s. Worse as the
summer months approached, polio struck down children as well as adults, both
paralyzing and killing. Polio was second only to the atomic bomb in surveys of
what Americans feared most.
My two brothers, Tommy and Kenny, contracted polio within
weeks of each other in June 1946. They were to remain in the polio ward of New
York’s Knickerbocker Hospital for fourteen months receiving the only effective
treatment that existed at the time, Sister Kenny hot packs.
The only time I saw them during those months was when they
were taken outside on the porch pictured in the photo above. It was several
stories above the ground. Periodically my parents would take me to a spot below
where I could look up and wave to them. Tommy is on the bed in the very front, Kenny is in the 3rd crib back from the front.
As a parent I’ve often looked back and wondered how my dad—a
devoted father—managed to every day go to the business of making cartoons with
this heavy weight in his heart.
Sources:
Wikipedia
Seavey,
Nina Gilden, Jane S. Smith, & Paul Wagner. A Paralyzing Fear: The
Triumph over Polio in America. New York, New York: TV Books. 1998.
|
This blog is in memory of Seymour Kneitel, an exceptional animator and director from the Golden Age of Animation. His career in animation began at the age of 16, attending high school during the day while working after school and Saturdays for Bray Studios, an early pioneering animation studio. The major portion of his later animation career was spent with Fleischer Studios and its' two successor studios... Famous Studios and Paramount Cartoon Studios.
Saturday, August 11, 2012
SERIOUS BUSINESS...
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Thank you so much for sharing all this wonderful information. I've been a fan of your dad's work and that of the Fleischer Studio ever since I was a kid. This blog is amazing!
ReplyDeleteThanks so much- I appreciate the feed-back...
ReplyDeletei'm so sorry that your family had to endure such a tragedy.
ReplyDeletewere the treatments effective? did your brothers suffer after effects from the illness?
Hi-thanks for asking--- those were the ONLY treatments around at the time. Both my brothers experienced the life-long effects of polio, mostly affecting their ability to walk. Throughout their lives both walked with difficulty, often using some type of cane- and later in life experienced the serious post-polio problems that hit so many young polio sufferers. It was a terrible disease.
ReplyDelete