For 10 weeks, McDonald was quarantined and given a hot pack treatment that involved being wrapped in hot wool blankets and plastic. She permanently lost the use of her legs, but she worked to build up strength and lived a normal life for almost 60 years.

"It took me quite a while before I really had self-confidence, because you are different and everybody knows you're different," McDonald, 72, said. "There's just a period there when you have to kind of develop again."

An estimated 1.2 million Americans like McDonald survived polio epidemics that swept the United States in the 1940s and 1950s, said Anna Rubin, polio education and outreach coordinator for the International Rehabilitation Center for Polio.

Now, one of the most significant events in recent American history is being explored through the Polio Oral History Project, Rubin said. The project was created to capture the stories of polio survivors, their families and those impacted by the virus, she said. Their stories will be featured in an exhibition on polio at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., in 2005, she said.

"You talk to anybody who's over 50 and they will have strong memories of polio, whether they had it or not," Rubin said. "They'll remember not being allowed to go swimming in their local swimming pool or being removed from the city during the summer, which was the peak time for the epidemic."

Polio survivor Aldine Manning, 76, said the area around Amarillo was hit hard by the virus in the early 1950s and that there are many local towns with polio survivors whose stories should be told. Manning said she was 17 when she became infected with both bulbar and spinal polio and was hospitalized for nearly a year.

"Even after I came home from the hospital months later, my neighbor kids were not permitted to come visit because the parents thought they would get polio," Manning said.

When she recovered, she said she was able to walk with some difficulty and later marry and live a good life.

In 1987, Manning started the Top of Texas Post-Polio Support Group, which meets four times a year and sends out newsletters. The newsletters inform polio survivors that their stories might be beneficial to others and educate them about post-polio syndrome, a condition that further weakens the muscles of survivors 10 to 40 years after recovery.

The group's next meeting will be at 1 p.m. June 21 at Desperado's BBQ & Steaks, 1503 S. Madison St.