In the fall of 1956, Elvis Presley was the most talked-about young man in America. He was 21 years old and already had a stack of hit records. Teenagers everywhere copied the way he sang and the way he moved. When he turned up on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” the most popular program on Sunday night television, the whole country tuned in.
His second time on the show was 70 years ago tomorrow, on Sunday, October 28, 1956, at CBS Studio 50 in New York.
Before he ever stepped in front of the cameras that night, though, something happened backstage that had nothing to do with music. Photographers crowded around him, Elvis rolled up his sleeve, and a doctor gave him a shot.
Back then, polio was one of the scariest things a parent could think of. It mostly struck children, and it could leave them unable to walk. A new vaccine had finally come along, but plenty of families still hadn’t gotten their kids protected. Health officials in New York were especially worried that teenagers were skipping it.
So they tried something clever. If the one young man every teenager in America was watching would roll up his sleeve, maybe the rest would follow along.
New York City’s health commissioner, Dr. Leona Baumgartner, met Elvis backstage. She held his arm while her assistant commissioner, Dr. Harold Fuerst, gave him the polio shot. The March of Dimes helped arrange the whole thing. Cameras flashed, and the picture ran in newspapers coast to coast the next morning.
Dr. Baumgartner knew just what she was doing. She told the New York Times, “He is setting a fine example for the youth of the country.”
The timing mattered. The paper reported the next day that only about one in ten of the city’s teenagers had gotten the vaccine so far. A single photo of Elvis taking his shot might do what no official warning could.
The shot itself was only photographed, never filmed, so no video of that backstage moment exists. What does exist is real footage of what Elvis did a little later that same night, in front of the live crowd.
Elvis sings “Love Me Tender” on the Ed Sullivan stage, October 28, 1956
There’s a warm little footnote to the polio story. Months afterward, the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis offered signed Elvis photos to any fan club that could prove every member had been vaccinated. Teenagers actually lined up their friends to get the shots, just to earn one.
That same night Elvis also sang “Don’t Be Cruel” and “Love Me,” and then he let loose on his biggest number. Here he is with it.
Elvis performs “Hound Dog” the same night, October 28, 1956
Nobody claims one photograph ended polio. But it was meant to help, and coming from the most famous young man in the country, it reached kids who might not have paid attention to anyone else. Seventy years on, people still remember that picture of Elvis with his sleeve rolled up, taken on a night everyone had tuned in to hear him sing.