Speakers

How FDR Vanquished Polio.
Few Americans remember that FDR, besides leading our country through the Great Depression and World War II, was also the founder of the National Foundation of Infantile Paralysis, better known as the March of Dimes. This charity fought the terrible scourge of polio with both assistance to the stricken and research to find a vaccine, finally working itself out of a job when the Salk Vaccine was perfected in 1955. This is a lively, personal look at the polio crusade — which continues today to mop up the last of this disease in third world countries. Illustrated lecture.

Kathryn Smith is a journalist and writer with a life-long interest in FDR and his circle. 
Smith has lived all her life in Georgia and South Carolina, and earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism at the University of Georgia. She worked as a daily newspaper reporter and editor, and has been the book columnist for the Anderson Independent Mail for twenty years. Her specialization in health care reporting led to the establishment and management of a charity for cancer patients in her hometown of Anderson, S.C.

Smith also has a special interest in polio through her long membership in Rotary International. (She was one of the first women inducted into Rotary in the late 1980s.) She has been involved in Rotary’s worldwide effort to eradicate polio, called PolioPlus, and she has lectured and spoken on FDR’s leadership in the polio arena. Smith is the author of an oral history of World War II told by living veterans and civilians called A Necessary War. (From author's website)