Life was simply good. I was anticipating college sports and had the best part of my life ahead—years when I could pursue my many dreams: perfect my guitar-playing, maybe start a band, find that special girl to marry, raise talented and gifted kids, learn to fly an airplane…and, of course, become a P.E. teacher .

One fear families had in those days was a disease called polio or infantile paralysis. By that summer 60,000 kids had died of polio and another million were crippled. Dr. Jonas Salk had produced a vaccine that people were heralding as the end of the dreaded disease, and the vaccine was filtering through cities and towns. By April of 1955, forty-four states had distributed it. Eventually, it would reach Pateros, Washington, population 700.

As that summer afternoon wore down, I wore down with it. I felt increasingly sick, like I had the flu. I had taken off my shirt earlier that day to deepen my already great suntan, but now my dusty body was streaked with sweat from both the heat and a rising fever. My neck hurt and felt stiff. I unhooked the old hay rake, pulled the tractor under a lean-to, turned it off, and struggled over to my Ford for the five-mile drive back home.

It was all I could do to drive. I told my mother I didn’t feel like dinner, and headed down to my bedroom in the basement. She started to worry, for polio was still a word people whispered with dread. It struck without warning. As the night came on, I became increasingly sick, vomiting every few minutes into a bucket by my bed. My back and neck were in constant pain and my fever rose higher and higher.

Our family doctor lived close by, and hurried over to check on me. He hit my elbow and knee joints with his little hammer and found no reflexes.

" I think it’s polio," he told my anxious parents. "We could take him in for a spinal tap and confirm it, but I’m pretty sure. Dan needs to be isolated. He is extremely contagious until the fever breaks."

The nearest hospital set up to handle polio was 60 miles away in Wenatchee. The other option was to isolate me at home until the fever broke. My parents decided to keep me at home.

I remember many hours of fever, vomiting and incredible pain racking my back and spinal column. Then one day I awoke unable to move my right arm—the same arm which had received such a healthy workout raking hay that Saturday. My left arm was next. The pain told me that my legs would soon be immovable. By the end of the week, all four limbs were useless. All I could move was my left wrist and fingers.

My world shrank to my small basement bedroom. One light bulb lit my dungeon of pain, and in the daytime, some light came through a one-by-two-foot window at the top of the basement’s cement block wall.

My fever hung on for nearly two weeks. I was unable to even turn over in my bed. I had much difficulty urinating and no bowel movements—nothing would move!

In one week, I went from a healthy 18 year old athlete, to a helpless 18 year old baby!

I had to rely on Mom to feed me, wash me, and turn me over, pick me up in her arms again.

 When people came to visit, they always kept a murky basement window between us. They would hunch down, cup their hands around their eyes, and stare down at me. I felt like I was on display at the zoo. 

In days, I had gone from being an athletic, confident teenager, ready for life, to a helpless "exhibit" of the ravages of polio. I also became a statistic—I was one of the last acute polio cases in Washington State. The Salk vaccine reached Pateros soon after I became sick.

It seemed as though I lost my whole body. To keep from getting discouraged, I thought of how much I had: supportive parents and sisters and wonderful people praying for me. I was also praying that somehow I would be spared a few muscles. That didn’t seem possible, though, after my two weeks in solitary confinement. My body was as stiff as a piece of timber. I simply couldn’t bend. I couldn’t sit up, so three people lifted me like a board on their shoulders and carried me out of my "hole" to a borrowed station wagon. Sixty miles later, I was admitted to Deaconess Hospital in Wenatchee, Washington. It was the middle of summer, and I was not to return home until there was snow on the ground, 100 days later.

Polio delayed my dreams.