Of breath and grace

Over the 54 years she has spent with her iron lung, Martha Mason (’60) has inspired her family, friends, and folks who know her only by reputation.

have known about Martha Mason (’60) as long as I can remember, but we have been good friends for only a year. As a little girl visiting my grandparents on their farm near Lattimore, N.C., I came across a photograph I didn’t understand in my uncle’s high school yearbook. Seeing a young woman encased in what looked like a long, metal barrel shocked me. That’s how I first learned about Martha Mason, polio, and iron lungs.

As a teenager, I remember learning that she had graduated from Wake Forest, the school at the top of my own list of colleges to attend. I wanted to know more about her, but I had also heard about her preference for privacy. As more years passed, the desire to meet Martha grew inside of me to the point that it felt more like a calling than an impulse, and finally I wrote her a note of introduction a little over a year ago.

In that note, I mentioned my grandfather because I knew he had organized a group of men to put a new roof on her house once when that needed to be done. I mentioned my friendship with Emily Herring Wilson (MA ’62), whom I knew she had met and whose poetry I felt she would admire, as well as my friendship with one of Martha’s favorite teachers, Ed Wilson (’43). Of course, I also mentioned that I share her legendary love of Wake Forest, my own alma mater, and that I am a faculty member in the Department of Communication. I was nervous about mailing such a chatty note to someone I’d never met, but even then a more formal correspondence would have seemed false.

Christmas Eve a year ago I enjoyed the first of many visits, e-mails, and phone calls with my friend Martha Mason. There are rare occasions when you meet another person and feel that mutual and simultaneous “click.” And so it was with us. We share a love of books and movies, a keen interest in politics, and roots in the larger Lattimore community, but the foundation for it all is our shared connection to Wake Forest.

Martha flies the Wake Forest banner outside her home and has a shrine of Deacon memorabilia in her room, including her prized possessions: a football autographed by Coach Jim Grobe, a basketball autographed by Coach Skip Prosser and the basketball team, and a baseball autographed by Coach George Greer and the baseball team.

Several months into our friendship, Martha asked me to read a manuscript. Very few of her friends knew, at the time, that she had used her voice-activated computer to write a memoir. We have talked quite a bit about her ambivalence about revealing so much about her life. Clearly, hers is an inspiring story, but Martha continues to value her privacy. She has been torn between her need to maintain her privacy and dignity and what is a competing need to acknowledge the people who have enhanced her life, particularly her parents, who provided her with exceptional care.

I read every page of the memoir, “Breath: Life in the Rhythm of an Iron Lung,” with awe. During some passages, especially those dealing with her brother’s death and her own struggle with polio, I would find myself holding my breath as I read. Certainly, there were tears in the reading, but there were just as many smiles. Her story is as tender as it is unique.

Her idyllic childhood evokes nostalgia in me for a life I never lived, but the story of Martha’s childhood is familiar because she is a contemporary of my mother. Her own mother, Euphra Mason, exhibited a rare and ferocious love for her child that is surely responsible, along with Martha’s own will to learn and know, for her daughter’s longevity in a condition that many, many others did not survive.

The chapter of her memoir detailing Martha’s college experience is the most entertaining in the book. The first two years she attended Gardner-Webb College, which is only five miles south of Lattimore. Her parents moved into campus housing with her, and she excelled in her studies. She writes: “I think I was born with supercharged competitive genes. I always expect to win the gold. Perhaps polio also had a card to play in my push to cross the line first. From the beginning, I feared my teachers might have pity (an ugly little word) for me. I wanted no inflated grades because I needed a machine to inflate my lungs. That would have given me an ego with lots of space but little core. I knew that if I got high marks across the board from teachers of every ilk, my grades would not be tainted by noxious pity. Yet my love of knowledge, rooted in my early years, sometimes surprised me and made me momentarily forget my quest for first place.”

As she notes, graduating at the head of Gardner-Webb’s class of 1958 made it possible for her to take the next step and attend Wake Forest College. It is surprising to hear that Martha, who is so very partisan in her support of the “Old Gold and Black,” dreamed of attending the University of North Carolina as a child. The size of the campus in Chapel Hill and the logistics of such a move made that option less attractive by the time she was ready to go to college. Besides, Euphra and Willard Mason visited Wake Forest and found the people they met on campus warm and welcoming, and her father was able to take a two-year leave from his job back home and locate a job in Winston-Salem while there were no such prospects in Chapel Hill.

The trip to number 10 Faculty Drive was quite an adventure. “Off I went in an iron lung anchored securely in the back of a Bost Bread truck snared by our friend Carlos, Mother beside me in a lashed-down lawn chair. Dad, eyes filled with anxiety, sat beside the driver. In the open backdoor of the Shelby bakery’s truck, Bus hovered over the little gasoline generator that furnished electricity for the iron lung. Ken followed in his truck loaded with a backup generator and all sorts of tools and spare parts. A plume of acrid black smoke from the generator’s exhaust trailed behind.”

What follows are two years’ worth of stories about panty raids (yes, she participated in a most humorous way), friends, community gatherings, social issues, an early example of technology and distance learning, and teachers. Always, Martha has a special place in her heart for her favorite professors. She recalls Cronje Earp, E. E. Folk, John Broderick, and Ed Wilson and tells stories about how each influenced her learning.

She writes of her invitation to join Phi Beta Kappa and mentions in passing that she graduated on June 6, 1960 “first in the first class to graduate from the Winston-Salem campus,” but it is the Wake Forest community she enjoyed for two years—a community of students, faculty, faculty families, staff, and her own parents—that she writes of most lovingly.

As I said, our shared connection to the Wake Forest community provides a foundation for our friendship. She was delighted to learn that the married student trailer park that was once located where Palmer-Piccolo Residence Hall sits currently was, in fact, my first home and that by now I’ve spent half my life either living or working at Wake Forest. I love to make Martha smile, and imagining me as a baby in the college trailer park elicited an especially wide grin.

When an active, fearless, bookworm of girl contracts polio at age 11 and needs the assistance of an iron lung to breathe for the rest of her life, that is a tragedy. When that girl grows physically, intellectually, and emotionally into a woman who is motivated by her desire to know and her need to be, then the story is extraordinary. Over the 54 years she has spent with her iron lung, Martha Mason has inspired her family, friends, and folks who know her only by reputation to live above their circumstances, though no one else has done so with her grace.

My life is better for knowing Martha Mason, and I hope she feels the same way about knowing me. She understands more about friendship, learning, and community than most of us begin to know.

By Mary M. Dalton (’83), assistant professor in the Department of Communication, and a filmmaker and film critic.

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