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the Catholic Church and decided that John would be raised as a Presbyterian.
     So one Sunday Marion drove John to the Church of the Covenant in downtown Erie and enrolled him in Sunday School. But it was
     not long before Elsie decided the Presbyterians were little better than the Catholics. “All they want is money,” she complained.
     She had no money for the church. She severed her relationship with the Presbyterians and withdrew John from Sunday School.
     For years she inveighed against organized religion. John grew up not attending church and without any religious affiliation.
     On Air Force records he would later list his religion as Presbyterian, but that was only a word to fill in a blank space.
    For several years it seemed that despite all odds Elsie might prevail in her battle to control her world. It seemed she had
     surmounted the difficulties life had placed in her path. Life settled into a tolerable routine.
    Marion graduated from high school and was attending Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, when, on March 20, 1933, she received
     aletter from her mother. The letter said the Depression had forced banks in Erie to close and that John had the measles and
     had to stay home from school for sixteen days. “It was terrible trying to keep him in a dark room,” Elsie wrote. “He is acting
     like a young colt.” She said the front of the house was posted with a large sign saying a case of measles was inside and predicted
     that Ann would soon have them too.
    Ann did contract measles, and a month or so after the disease had run its course, she became sick again, this time with a
     kidney infection. She stayed for two weeks at a nearby Catholic hospital, and when she came home, she was weak and listless.
     Eventually Dr. Frank Krimmel, the family doctor, came to the house, examined Ann, and pronounced that she had polio. In 1933
     very little was known about polio. It was thought to be a contagious summer disease, perhaps contracted in swimming pools.
     As was the practice at the time, a large sign was tacked to the front door of the Boyd home saying POLIO MYELITIS . No one could enter except family members. When neighborhood children passed the house, they walked on the other side of
     Lincoln Street and shouted to any Boyd children who might be visible, “We don’t want to catch anything!” They treated the
     house as if it had been visited by the plague.
    In later years John would have special reason to remember this.
    After Ann was diagnosed with polio, her mother stripped the linen runner from the fine mahogany dining table and the table
     became a place to perform stretching exercises for Ann’s twisted legs. Every day Ann was gently placed on the table and Elsie
     rubbed and pulled and massaged her tiny legs. Her disease dominated the Boyd household. Elsie wanted to take Ann to the nearby
     Zem Zem Shriners Hospital where treatment was both good and free, but the hospital rarely admitted Catholic children. She
     went to a neighbor who was a Mason and asked him to plead Ann’s case. He did and Ann was admitted, but the treatment was to
     little avail. A few months later the doctors said Ann should have surgery on her foot. She transferred to a clinic in Cleveland,
     where she stayed a year. Even in the early 1930s such a lengthy stay, combined with complex treatment, was expensive. The
     surgery and the hospital bill was paid by HammerMill Paper Company. A second operation was performed on a charitybasis. Elsie ordered her children never to tell anyone how payment for the operations was handled.
    The year Ann was in the hospital was difficult in the extreme for Elsie. Marion transferred to Mercyhurst, an all-girls’ college
     in Erie, and took care of the four children at home. Elsie often drove the one hundred miles to Cleveland, visited with Ann,
     then returned. She stayed for more than a week after each of Ann’s operations.
    When Elsie brought Ann home, it was clear that neither the operations nor