She also published short stories, articles, and two books for adults. The couple later moved to California, where they adopted two children.īefore she began writing books for children, Kehret wrote radio commercials and plays. Her autobiography won the Golden Kite Award from the Society of Children’s Book Writers & Illustrators, and the PEN Center USA West Award for Children’s Literature.Īfter attending the University of Minnesota for a year, she married Carl Kehret. Most of her main characters are around age twelve. Peguin reports that because Kehret can remember her experience with polio so vividly, she finds it easy to write in the viewpoint of a young person. Her experience of the illness changed Kehret’s life, as she describes in her memoir Small Steps: The Year I Got Polio. Fortunately, she made nearly a complete recovery. No one knows how she developed polio, but Kehret surmises in her FAQ that she probably got it from someone who has such a mild case that they were never diagnosed. Kehret had each of the three types of polio: spinal, respiratory, and the most severe kind, bulbar. Growing up in Minnesota, she had a happy life except for a bout in 1949 at age twelve with polio which paralyzed her from the neck down and hospitalized her for several months. A long-time volunteer at her local animal humane society, she often uses animals in her stories.Īs a child, Peg Kehret wanted to be either a writer or a veterinarian. She has won many state “young reader” or “children’s choice” awards. The girls all partake in the Christmas program, where Peg is able to walk with a boy to the stage.Peg Kehret’s novels for young people are regularly recommended by the American Library Association, the International Reading Association, and the Children’s Book Council.

After Peg improves, she is moved back to the Sheltering Arms hospital where she rooms with four other girls who have polio, Dorothy, Shirley, Alice and Renee. After she starts to recover, the so-called Mrs. Every day, she changes the hot pack part of the Kenny treatment to hot baths instead. Peg reads to him when she's feeling better, and they listen to The Lone Ranger. Her new room has a roommate named Tommy who is put into an iron lung. After a few days, she is allowed to move out of isolation but all of the things in her room are burned because they may contain the virus. Peg is placed under an oxygen tent to help her breathe a little easier. She spends a little time at Sheltering Arms before she is transferred to University Hospital because she needs a respirator. Her parents take her to the hospital where she is diagnosed with three different kinds of polio.

She goes home with a high fever, and around midnight, she starts to vomit.

In September 1949, Peg collapses at her school in Austin, Minnesota.

Small steps book polio