As a child growing up in the 1940s, Holland resident John Gronberg remembers when polio was a real threat to Americans.

Newspapers were filled with pictures of the iron lung, the medical device that patients lived in because the disease robbed them of the ability to breath on their own.

"Polio was still epidemic in the late 1940s ... at times, you were asked to stay indoors," said Gronberg, referring to the decade before a vaccine was discovered.

But while polio is no longer a problem in this country, Gronberg and the rest of the Holland and Zeeland Rotary clubs don't want people to forget the pain it caused, and still causes in some areas of the world. As part of Rotary International's latest fund raiser to eliminate the disease, the local groups have brought an iron lung to the Holland Museum, on loan from the Public Museum of Grand Rapids. It will be showcased through Sept. 29. The local group's goal is to raise $1 to $10 per person in the Holland area.

"Over the next several weeks, we are going to make an impact in the local area," Gronberg said. He is a member of the Holland Rotary Noon Club.

The medical device exhibited at the Holland Museum was made around 1946 and has spent time at the Holland City Hospital, and the Mary Free Bed Rehabilitation Hospital in Grand Rapids, said Chris Carron, curator of collections at the Grand Rapids museum. It was donated to the Grand Rapids museum in 1995 by a local resident who used it for testing equipment.

The iron lung was invented in the 1930s and a patient's entire body, except the head, was placed in the metal tank. The person breathed with pumps that increased and decreased of pressure in the device, which compressed and expanded the chest.

Joel Lefever, the curator of the Holland Museum, had never seen the machine up close before Friday.

"It just looks horrible. It looks like a torture chamber," Lefever said of the tubular 6-foot machine. "For people who had polio and other respiratory problems, it saved their lives."

Now, in order to save lives, Rotary International is hoping to raise $80 million worldwide to vaccinate those areas still needing help.

Grand Rapids resident William Sprague, who has worked with the Rotary Club vaccinating individuals around the world since 1987, said areas experiencing conflict such as northern India and northern Nigeria still need vaccinations.

"It's very expensive to get to those places," Sprague said, who returned from efforts in Sudan this March.

But Sprague is confident that the Holland and Zeeland Rotary approach of using the iron lung will be successful.

"When we had it in Grand Rapids, it was a tremendous fund raiser," he said.

Those interested in helping the local clubs can make checks out to Polio Eradication HZRC.