District Polio Plus chair brings personal perspective

 

 

Bill Hollingshead (left) with Ricky Nelson, one of the many musicians he represented as a concert producer.

I n 1947, 10-year-old Bill Hollingshead peered through a fence at the Yolo County Fair. “On Saturday night, I was looking at a hillbilly band playing to 1,000 people,” he recalls. He was enthralled by the audience’s reaction. “They were hootin’ and hollerin’ and clappin’,” he says.

Hollingshead had discovered his calling. A lifelong Californian, he went on to work as a concert producer, representing ’60s pop idols Frankie Avalon, Ricky Nelson, Fabian, the Kingsmen (who popularized the party song “Louie Louie”), and surf-rock pioneers Jan and Dean and the Surfaris.

Yet despite being in a promotional business, Hollingshead kept quiet about one thing: his experience as a polio survivor. One evening in July 1951, he told his parents he felt ill. The next day, he remembers, he was at San Francisco Children’s Hospital, being rolled down a hallway lined with iron lungs. None of his friends came to visit. Even his minister stayed away. “I must have done something wrong to have lost all my friends,” he recalls thinking. “It was like a social stigma, that I was tainted or that I was untouchable. I asked a pretty girl to a dance. The next morning, she came back with a sad face. ‘My parents won’t let me go with you. You have polio.’”

Hollingshead rebuilt his strength in the school gym, challenging himself, day by day, to inch his way up a climbing ladder. He tuned up his confidence too, fronting dance bands during high school and at the University of California, Davis. Drafted into the U.S. Army, he served in the Continental Army Command Band, where he honed a comedy and magic routine.

Before he joined the Rotary Club of Tustin/Santa Ana in 2000, he didn’t know that polio eradication was Rotary’s major priority. Once he became a member, he started talking about being a polio survivor, telling his fellow Rotarians things he had never told anyone. “I was so overwrought with the guilt, the shame that I had buried for so long,” he recalls. “It started coming out like a volcano.”

In October 2001, 50 years after contracting polio, he traveled to Ghana for a National Immunization Day. Now the District 5160 PolioPlus Subcommittee chair and a member of the Rotary Club of Davis, he’s helped raise tens of thousands of dollars to eradicate the disease, delivering scores of presentations with his trademark let’s-put-on-a-show style. “Bill is a very charismatic kind of guy,” says Past District Governor Mark von Hoetzendorff. His effectiveness lies in educating those “who give the blank stare and ask, why is this disease still around?” Call it a testament to his ability to reach those who ponder life’s mysteries – like the lyrics to “Louie Louie.”