A lasting link to discovery
DAISYTOWN, Pa. -- The steel braces on Jim Sarkett's legs poke through his blue jeans as he leans back on his living room recliner.
He hasn't moved all morning from this corner vantage point -- strategically positioned across from the TV and within arms reach of the front door.
Using a small, round mirror, he spots visitors approaching his house in Washington County. He opens the door right on cue.
"Too old and too crippled," Sarkett, 65, says wistfully, his silver blue eyes locked on a TV game show. "What else am I going to do?"
The braces that hold his knees and legs in place, along with a pair of aluminum crutches nearby, are a constant reminder of his lifelong battle against polio and its aftereffects.
Sarkett was only 10 in the hot summer of 1950 when doctors delivered the grim news that he had the virus.
The strain coursing through his bloodstream was the rarest and most dangerous of three known types. It also was the one Dr. Jonas Salk needed to make his miracle vaccine. The simple act of submitting to a blood test thrust Sarkett into medical history.
As his wife dusted off yellowed newspaper clippings on a recent winter afternoon, Sarkett spoke about his childhood.
He remembered the excruciating muscle pain. He remembered the headaches and high fever. He remembered the three years he spent at the D.T. Watson Home for Crippled Children in Leet because his parents had to tend to their farm and couldn't care for him.
And he remembered Salk.
"He was quiet, a very nice man," Sarkett said.
Salk's lab at the University of Pittsburgh was one of four commissioned by the March of Dimes -- then called the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis -- to prove there were three strains of poliovirus.
Salk and his team isolated poliovirus from Sarkett's blood and determined he contracted Type 3. This strain infects the lower bulb of the brain, often leading to paralysis of the breathing muscles and death.
Salk used Sarkett's virus in his experimental vaccine. It was famously dubbed the Saukett strain because someone misspelled his last name.
"I wasn't old enough to comprehend what it was going to do," Sarkett said.
By the time children across America were being vaccinated, Sarkett was 13 and poliovirus had run its course through his body.
The burly, 6-foot-tall boy who never thought he would walk could now do so -- albeit with the use of leg braces and crutches. Without them, his knees collapsed when he stood. His legs had turned into a useless heap of skin and bones. He could not play football as he had dreamed.
But Sarkett never let his disability stop him.
With a pair of trusty crutches, he went up and down steps and rode horses. He studied accounting and worked as a coal mine dispatcher, a crane operator and a bookkeeper. He rode an ATV into the woods to go hunting.
"I never thought of myself as disabled," Sarkett said in his deep, sluggish voice.
Sarkett's wife of 42 years, Pat, speaks with pride about her husband's courage and drive. She choked back tears when recalling that her father warned her not to marry Sarkett because of his disability. The couple has two sons and a daughter.
"Hey, I'm proud of you because you never let it get you down," she told her husband after he asked her not to discuss painful memories.
Pat Sarkett recalled that in her younger days, she enjoyed farming and gardening, and her husband was not one to just sit and watch.
When time came to put a new fence around the house, Sarkett got on his hands and knees and dragged himself across the yard digging holes.
Life is different for the Sarketts now that old age is creeping in. The couple spends most days at home watching TV.
Sarkett, who retired in 1998, desperately needs new leg braces. After learning from the Trib that he couldn't afford them, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and Union Orthotics and Prosthetics in Squirrel Hill agreed to cover the cost of doctors' visits and new braces and crutches.
"You're talking big bucks that we don't have any more," Pat Sarkett said. "We are thrilled they're doing this for us."
Not that Sarkett would fret.
The man who made such an important contribution to Salk's polio vaccine is just as happy to sit home on his recliner.
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