Frederick Cann
Yesterday was the fiftieth anniversary of the pronouncement that Jonas Salk and his team had discovered an effective vaccine to treat poliomyletis. Three years later new cases of polio had disappeared.
It so happens that I had an intimate connection with the demonic virus. My first cousin, the son of my mother’s sister whose maiden name was Lodi Austerlitz DeSeay, who had been named by her father who was a physician in Ruston, Louisiana and was a descendant of Gerneral DeSaix, who saved Napoleon’s fortunes at the Battle of Marengo, in which DeSaix was killed. I have the commemorative medal which Napoleon gave his family.
My mother was named Jena Wagram DeSeay, again referring to Napoleon’s battles. Frederick and his sister Sarah Anne Cann were visiting their sister in New York and went out to Jones Beach to swim. They both caught polio. Sarah Anne suffered some disability in her legs and walks with a cane. Frederick was a fine physical and mental specimen, with a jocular disposition when he contracted the disease at seventeen years of age.
Frederick contracted the bulbar type and it was touch and go with him for a while. He survived but had to live in an iron lung for the rest of his life, and may have been the person to have lived the longest in one, having been committed to it when he was seventeen and having died in his sixties.
Frederick lived with Sarah Anne for a while, but as she began to raise a family this present problems and he moved into a house of his own, eventually obtaining one next to a fire station where he could quickly call on the firemen if the need arose.
Frederick was paralyzed from the neck down.
He learned to use the telephone with a dialing stick in his mouth. He studied for an obtained a real estate license and became engaged in business. He learned to paint by holding the brush in his mouth and produced some very good oil paintings. He kept up with current events and also with people. He developed new personal contacts, such as Steele Burden, the landscape architect who developed the present grounds o Louisiana State University, with its picturesque live oaks dominating the campus.
Steele and his brother, Pike, a great jokester, who ran a successful printing establishment on the side, were great donors to the University and created the Burden Rural Life Museum, which is a replica Louisiana plantation life on their property, which is visited by many people, and is located where they once had a private airport when Pike was barnstorming. This is where Frederick is buried.
When an irate customer called Pike about a delayed order, Pike told him that he would deliver the print job the next day, which he did by dropping them over the client’s house from three thousand feet. I was in the City Club of Baton Rouge one day, sitting at a table with Pike and Lewis Gottlieb, a president of a bank who, perhaps because of his seriousness, Pike loved to kid. Pike asked Lewis is he could borrow his umbrella. He stepped into a corner and came back with the umbrella thoroughly wet. He returned the umbrella to Lewis, and said, "I couldn’t wait!". Lewis was considerably flustered. What Pike had done was to squirt water from a container he had in his pocket.
Lewis would rent a whole car for the excursions made to the games by the followers of the L.S.U. football team.
My Uncle Jesse and Pike would always accompany him.
They made a trip to Nashville where Pike in his usual jovial mode began passing bogus hundred dollar bills he had printed. The FBI apprehended him. He told them that he was visiting the city in the company of a well known contractor and the president of a bank.
They called Uncle Jesse and Lewis Gottlieb who both denied knowing him. It was real payback time. Of course, subsequently they relented, and got him off.
But to return to Frederick, Clarence Wilson, a black, worked for me, bit he was more than that. In my family we always had what we called "colored folks” employed who in every sense really became "part of the family". When Frederick became ill I tuned over Clarence to him. Clarence would cook his meals, clean the house and otherwise assist him. Frederick left Clarence a significant sum in his will
The amazing thing about Frederick was his mental attitude. When I would visit him I was always struck by his positive approach. Having known him as a playful youngster, both physically and mentally well endowed, one would have thought that he would now be embittered by his physical condition. But there was no trace of that.
Conversations with him displayed unusual intelligence and knowledge of current affairs, as well as involvement in various projects. For example, he told me that I should check out a property east of the lovely Destin, Florida beach. I went to look at the property and was duly impressed. I called the broker in Memphis who was handling it on a Saturday and told him I would buy the property at the amount at which it was listed. When I called him on Monday he said that he had told a fellow in Memphis that I wanted to buy the property and sold it to him. The property as since been developed into a premier subdivision
This is but an illustration of Frederick’s approach to living in a world from which he refused to withdraw. When I was stationed at Norfolk, in the Navy, and my daughter Sally, was quite young, and desiring to impart to her my love for the sea, I wanted to take her to Norfolk Beach, but that was cashiered because the polio epidemic was at its height.
When one thinks of the scourge that polio actually was, and there now seems to be some controversy with respect to the assistance others provided to Jonas Salk, it would seem not worth the candle to determine the precise contribution made by the discoverers of the vaccine. If Salk is only partially responsible that is sufficient to merit him the thanks of millions of human beings.