physician, but eventually abandoned that plan due to the obstacles women then faced in entering the profession. At the age of 25, in 1938, she married Joseph Scott Laurie III, and they resided in St. Louis. She took a secretarial course, worked as a decorator at The Warfield Shop, and volunteered as an American Red Cross Gray Lady. Joe Laurie served in the army, and the couple traveled frequently during the war years. Late in the 1940s, his job as a chemist and salesman for a brewing company took them to Cleveland, Ohio. During the polio epidemic of 1949, Gini Laurie began to work around the edges of polio rehabilitation as an American Red Cross volunteer at the Toomey Pavilion at Cleveland's City Hospital, later the twelfth of 15 Respiratory Care and Rehabilitation Centers funded by the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (March of Dimes). In the late 1940s and early 1950s, severely compromised polio survivors, especially those with respiratory difficulties, were often hospitalized for many months, or even years. Staff at such institutions relied heavily on volunteers to assist with patient services – reading, writing letters, and assisting therapists. Patients often developed close bonds with each other, and with the staff and volunteers. Those bonds were an important feature of their rehabilitation, but were often broken when patients were finally discharged. One of the things Laurie did as a volunteer at the Toomey Pavilion Center was to help publish its newsletter to alumni – a newsletter that was circulated widely to patients at the 14 other respiratory rehabilitation centers in the US. What followed is described by Joan L. Headley, executive director of Post-Polio Health International: The [respiratory rehabilitation] centers, where individuals with severe polio in need of rocking beds and iron lungs were sent, provided superb medical and psychological rehabilitation but, until 1953, most of the permanent respirator users seemed doomed to remain in the hospital for the rest of their lives. In order to save money by avoiding lifelong hospitalization at the high daily rate of $37, Rancho Los Amigos Respiratory Center for Poliomyelitis in Downey, California, pioneered a system of home care that cost only $10 per day, and polio survivors were sent home with their iron lungs and chest cuirasses. Meanwhile, Gini Laurie [continued to volunteer at Toomey Pavilion], and kept up with her old polio pals who had gone home. Reflecting in her later