George Pyle: The world is closed, so open a book

After another widespread and sometimes deadly epidemic, a little boy in a tiny Kansas town spent large parts of his childhood in and out of the hospital or flat on his back in a body cast.My father, born in 1927, contracted polio at an early age. The withering of muscles that accompanied the disease did not follow the same pattern in every person, and surgery to repair or compensate for dysfunctional or weakened limbs was improvised on a case-by-case basis.In my father’s case, the goal was