An iron lung was one of the most feared images of the polio epidemics that raged through the United States in the 1940s and 1950s. And it’s where Dianne Odell, of Jackson, Tenn., spent most of her 61 years until her death in May.

Odell was infected with polio at the age of three in 1950, just four years before the large-scale trials of Jonas Salk’s vaccine. Paralyzed from the disease, she lived the rest of her life in an iron lung, which uses negative pressure to help a polio patient breathe. Odell died during a power outage caused by thunderstorms.

“She was optimistic that [eradicating polio] would happen. She was very supportive of what Rotary did,” says Sheila Campbell, a childhood friend of Odell’s and a member of the Rotary Club of Tullahoma, Tenn. “Her hope and prayer was that no child would ever go through what she had gone through.”

Odell didn’t let the iron lung stop her from pursuing her interests. Campbell recalls going to Odell’s home as a teenager to play cards, holding them up to a mirror positioned over Odell’s head so that she could see. Odell attended college, wrote a children’s book, even volunteered as a phone counselor for people going through hardship.

The Rotary Club of Jackson made Odell a Paul Harris Fellow in 2002 at a meeting held at her home.

“All of the things The Four-Way Test says – that was her life,” says Frank McMeen, a member of the Jackson club and the head of a health care foundation that helped set up a fund for Odell. “She just saw the good in people.”

Read Dianne Odell’s speech from her Paul Harris Fellow ceremony.