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12.1.05

Can You Spare a Dime?

A picture ID'd.

Several readers wrote to supply a caption for the Main Street, Edgartown, photo, above, published in our September-October edition. Eddie Belisle told us, “I remember that day. We would line up to collect for the March of Dimes once a year, sponsored by the Edgartown Boys Club. This was about 1954. The boys, from right, are: Danny Bettencourt (killed in Vietnam), Billy Santos, David Marchant, David Bettencourt, Lenny Donaroma, Buddy Allen, Eddie Belisle, Dennis Arnold, unknown, Alfred Perry, Bobby Allen, Jimmy Worden, Donny Willoughby, and Bobby Santos (who died in a car accident as a teenager).” The March of Dimes raised money to find a polio vaccine, and Sara Kurth wrote that the goal was “not to stop until they lined dimes up from one end of Main Street to the other.” Allouise Morgan told us, “We always called polio ‘infantile paralysis.’ It was indeed a dreaded thing. . . . Alfred Perry, one of the young boys in this picture, had an older brother Frank, who did catch infantile paralysis. I still remember the horror on my mother’s face the morning Mrs. Perry made the telephone call with news of young Frank’s illness. Young Frank survived, life did go on, and I remember when a vaccine proved effective, and a cure had been found!”