Jonas Salk by Jacobs Charlotte DeCroes;

Jonas Salk by Jacobs Charlotte DeCroes;

Author:Jacobs, Charlotte DeCroes; [Jacobs, Charlotte DeCroes]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2015-03-23T00:00:00+00:00


To many, Donna and Jonas seemed a mismatch from the start. “I don’t know if it was an ideal relationship,” his longtime secretary, Lorraine Friedman, observed. “I think she was the type of person he thought he wanted to be married to, whom he wanted to be the mother of his children.”13 In that regard, Donna proved a fine wife. She relinquished her career with no complaints, raised three sons, and maintained the household. She had anticipated how consuming Jonas’s work would be, but not how narrow his world would become. He expressed no interest in the theater, the symphony, the books she read, the music she played. Part of the initial attraction had been his desire to help humankind. An activist at Smith College, Donna had voted for the American Labor Party in the early 1940s and was on the New York Conference for Inalienable Rights’ mailing list. A staunch Democrat, she supported the underdog. As Jonas moved more to the right and became increasingly apolitical, civil rights and fair housing laws faded from their conversations.

No one remembers Donna and Jonas laughing together, teasing, holding hands, showing any tenderness. Eschewing a dominating woman like his mother, Jonas ended up with a reserved, reticent wife. The more he withdrew into his lab, the more she retreated into her books and music. Donna continued to play the role of dutiful wife with no apparent resentment, no arguments. “There just wasn’t a peep,” their son Peter recalled. Beneath the veneer of a happy marriage ran undercurrents of discontent, arising from two prevailing tensions. The first was Jonas’s absence from their family life. Not only was he physically absent, he was emotionally absent as well. “He internalized all sorts of things,” according to Peter.14 While still in Ann Arbor, Salk had started his night writings, putting his private thoughts on paper, rather than sharing them with his wife or children.

The second tension centered on lifestyle. Jonas was developing a circle of scientific associates with whom Donna had nothing in common. If out-of-town scientists were visiting his lab, he invited them to dinner, often on the spur of the moment. “That kind of thing would drive my mother bananas,” Jonathan recalled. Donna liked her life structured, planned, without surprises. “He doesn’t understand,” she once complained to her son when his father brought home unexpected guests. “There are only four lamb chops.” After Basil O’Connor became his benefactor, Salk felt obliged to attend cocktail parties and dinner dances. Donna hated social affairs. “My mother’s idea of a wonderful evening,” Jonathan said, “was to get into her nightgown and get into bed with a good book.”15

As difficult as it had been for her, Donna had stood by her husband’s side during the polio vaccine extravaganza. Nevertheless, she could not bring herself to play the celebrity wife. The public may have wondered how their hero could be married to this impassive, modest woman who rarely smiled. “He was changed by his fame,” his sister-in-law Sylvia said. “She was not.



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