Joseph Sabino Mistick: We can do this, a lesson from Stacy Smith

Stacy Smith has seen a lot. The award-winning KDKA-TV news anchor has met the pope, interviewed presidents and reported from the scenes of human disasters. He has covered princes and paupers.

When interviewing a Missouri congressman in the U.S. Capitol, Stacy sat in the chair that a stunned Vice President Harry Truman was sitting in when he was first called “Mr. President” after being informed President Roosevelt had died.

And just as memorable for Stacy was his story about a Korean War vet who was being evicted to make room for a shiny new building. The guy had left a leg on the battlefield, his wife bolted after the war and now this. But he made the best of it, saying, “I hate this place anyways. I’m movin’ on.”

Stacy has known his own troubles, too. Suddenly one morning, when he was 6 months old, all he could move were his eyes. That passed in time but many struggles remained. He was 4 before he could walk, and then only with a steel brace on one leg, a tiny version of what he wears today.

The beginning of the end of the polio epidemic came in 1955, six years after Stacy contracted the disease. Church bells rang across the land when it was announced Dr. Jonas Salk’s vaccine was successful. It had been a dark time for decades until then.

“Every summer during the polio epidemic, the pools and playgrounds were empty, because parents instinctively quarantined their children and practiced social distancing,” Stacy says.

“Our parents had grown up in the Great Depression and they knew tough times. And they fought in World War II, so they knew what it took to fight the odds together.”

“The first rule is that you have to be aware and fearful of the virus,” he says. “Our parents acted out of love, and with the coronavirus, if you love your parents and grandparents, you need to look out for them.”

There is more cause for hope now. When Stacy was a boy, information was scarce and hopelessness plentiful. We wake up every morning to the news that the world’s smartest people continue to work around the clock to find treatment and a cure for the coronavirus. Science will beat this.

We will face some permanent challenges. Many children will always be a year or more behind. Some jobs and businesses will be gone. And even after the heroic work of our doctors and nurses, many victims will be dealing with cognitive and physical deficiencies.

As he approaches his 50th year in broadcasting, Stacy says that there were adjustments of necessity after the terror of polio passed, too, but folks naturally took life as it came and moved forward. And that was true even for the children who had survived the disease.

“Most of us just went to school with the other kids,” he says.

As for the lasting vestiges of the disease and the steel braces and crutches and wheelchairs that many of them needed going forward, Stacy says, “We just had to figure out how to keep up.” And that is wisdom we all need.