We all remember playing Candy Land, following the brightly colored path through the peppermint stick forest and gumdrop mountains, past the lollipop woods to get to Home Sweet Home. However, few people realize that this game would never have been invented if not for the last polio epidemic. 

The first US polio epidemic was in 1894, and the US saw a small surge of polio every summer thereafter. Some years, numbers of cases were higher, such as 1916, and then came the last major outbreak lasting from 1948 to 1955, peaking in 1952, with over 57,000 cases that year. People were terrified. No one knew how polio spread, only that it happened every summer, so everyone felt vulnerable. During outbreaks, public swimming pools and movie theatres were closed, parents kept their children away from amusement parks and places where other children congregated. Anxiety levels were high and newspaper headlines were sensational and frightening.

In 1948, Eleanor Abbott, a schoolteacher, contracted polio, and was hospitalized in San Diego. She was one of few adults in the hospital ward, and she, along with the many children in her ward spent long boring months in the hospital.

What would it have been like to be a child with polio in the 1940s? Lonely, for one, because parents were allowed only infrequent, brief visits. Medical professionals of the time thought that parents visiting would make the children cry and become homesick, and they felt this impeded healing. Additionally, there was concern that parents might bring infections into the hospital, or that children might spread their polio to their parents. So, children probably saw their parents only for a few minutes on Sunday afternoon. Sometimes, they only got to wave to them through the hospital window. If parents lived far away, they might not be able to visit at all.

Additionally, treatments for polio could be painful. If respiratory muscles were involved with polio-related paralysis, an iron lung was required, and children were totally immobile. If arms or legs were paralyzed, heavy metal braces were used to prevent muscles from tightening and limbs shrinking and bending. Some children were encased in plaster body casts. Hot packs, forceful massage, and physical therapy could be uncomfortable and frightening. Additionally, there were long hours, weeks, and months when nothing happened, awaiting healing. Hospitals of the 1940-50s did not have playrooms, play therapists, therapy dogs, televisions and movies like we expect now. And many of the children were too young to read. So, they lay in bed, talked to each other, and cried.

Eleanor Abbott to the rescue. Seeing the sad, bored, scared children around her, she decided to design a game children could play while confined to their bed. Board games in the post WWII baby boom era were already quite popular. Big sellers included Clue, Monopoly, Scrabble and Sorry!. Those games required reading, strategy, and were usually played with parents helping children. Eleanor had in mind a game simple enough to play with no adult help, no reading and only minimal counting skills. A fun, bright game to help children forget their loneliness. She thought a candy theme would be popular. Remember how to play? Turn over a card, count the colors on the card, and move that number of squares on the path.  Candy Land has bright colored cards, nothing to read, no strategy or decision-making, and only a little counting. Perfect for preschoolers who know their colors, and still interesting for older children. And drawing some cards make you go backwards, prolonging the game. In the hospital, the point was to pass the time, not to finish quickly, right? It was an immediate hit with the children in her polio ward.

Such a hit, in fact, the children convinced her to pitch it to the manufacturer Milton Bradley. Milton Bradley bought the game in 1949, and initially used it as a fill-in for its main product, school supplies. It had an enthusiastic reception, and outsold Milton Bradley’s most popular game, Uncle Wiggly. It continues to be a popular game; over one million are sold each year, and it is estimated that over 60% of households with a 5-year-old have a Candy Land game.

Have a look at the original board for Candy Land. See the boy? There’s a stripe along the side of his leg. That is a leg brace- homage to the children with polio who first played the game. Milton Bradley always downplayed the link of polio to Candy Land. The board was redesigned many times as years went by, and the boy with the leg brace disappeared pretty quickly. Polio was too scary. However, in 1998, for the 50th edition of the game, Milton Bradley included a brochure about Eleanor Abbott and polio.

And what about Eleanor Abbott? She lived in San Diego the rest of her life. She never forgot the children and gave all the royalties she received from Candy Land to charities for children in need.

And what about polio? The first successful polio vaccine, an injection, was developed by Jonas Salk, and distributed in 1955. The oral vaccine, developed by Albert Sabin, came in 1961. Many of us remember lining up for the pink sugar cubes; that was the Sabin vaccine. The Global Polio Eradication Initiative has been astonishingly effective. In the 1950s, polio killed or paralyzed over half a million people worldwide. In 1980 there were over 50,000 cases of polio worldwide. In 2023 there were 536 confirmed cases of polio.

So, the next time you see a child enjoying Candy Land, you can remember the hospitalized teacher and children who made it happen.