There is reason to believe that Abbott was ideally suited to consider polio from a child’s perspective. As a schoolteacher, she would have been acquainted with children’s thoughts and needs. And in 1948, when she was in her late 30s, she herself contracted the disease. Abbott recuperated in the polio ward of a San Diego hospital, spending her convalescence primarily among children.
Imagine what it must have been like to share an entire hospital ward with children struggling against polio, day after day, as an adult. Kids are poorly equipped to cope with boredom and separation from their loved ones under normal circumstances. But it would be even more unbearable for a child confined to a bed or an iron lung. That was the context in which Abbott made her recovery.
Seeing children suffer around her, Abbott set out to concoct some escapist entertainment for her young wardmates, a game that left behind the strictures of the hospital ward for an adventure that spoke to their wants: the desire to move freely in the pursuit of delights, an easy privilege polio had stolen from them.
From today’s perspective, it’s tempting to see Candy Land as a tool of quarantine, an excuse to keep kids inside in the way Shepherd remembers. The board game gathers all your children in one place, occupying their time and attention. Samira Kawash, a Rutgers University professor, suggests that this is the main way polio informed the game’s development. “The point of Candy Land is to pass the time,” she writes, “certainly a virtue when one’s days are spent in the boring confines of the hospital and an appealing feature as well of a game used to pass the time indoors for children confined to the house.” For Kawash, Candy Land justifies and extends the imprisonment of the hospital, becoming another means of restriction.
But the themes of Candy Land tell a different story. Every element of Abbott’s game symbolizes shaking off the polio epidemic’s impositions. And this becomes apparent if you consider the game’s board and mechanics relative to what children in polio wards would have seen and felt.
In 2010, when he was almost 70 years old, the polio survivor Marshall Barr recalled how only brief escapes from the iron lung were possible. The doctors “used to come and say, ‘You can come out for a little while,’ and I used to sit up perhaps to have a cup of tea,” he wrote, “but then they would have to keep an eye on me because my fingers would go blue and in about 15 minutes I would have to go back in again.” Children would have played Abbott’s early version of Candy Land during these breaks, or in their bed.