From The Shelby Star:LATTIMORE, N.C. - Cleveland County lost a most unusual world record setter May 4.
Martha Mason had bested polio, a once-pandemic disease, over 85 percent of her lifetime after being told she wouldn't live to her teen years.
One month shy of 72, Mason died early May 4 at home in tiny Lattimore, where she had "lived above" her disease flat on her back for more than 61 years.
Mason had always said that she would not let polio beat her. Her life demonstrated that she meant what she said.
She wrote in 2002, "As a youngster, in pre-polio days, I enjoyed sports and considered myself an athlete .... proud of my physical strength ... unusually self-reliant. Suddenly, I was an 11-year-old quadriplegic, I was not strong and I was completely reliant on others .... I would not be a whiner, but what would I be? ..."
What she would be is a person who never met a stranger, someone who overcame any obstacle deterring whatever goal she set and an inspiration whose influence will live on in the world.
Mason became the only person in the Southeastern United States still living in an iron lung and, by all accounts, the world's record holder in the 800-pound yellow machine that forced breath through her lungs every minute of every day and night.
"This is a total shock - I hate it," Shelby banker Bobby Smith said when he learned of Mason's passing. "I'm going to miss knowing that she's there.
"Martha was the kind of person you wanted everyone to meet," said Smith, who met her years ago as governor for Rotary District 7680.
Everywhere he went after that introduction, he told people about her, and just Saturday night, at a Rotary conference in Myrtle Beach, S.C., he had issued an invitation to the incoming district governor to visit.
Since 1985, Smith said, "Rotary International has as its goal the eradication of polio (it has not happened yet; there are still four countries affected - Pakistan, India, Afghanistan and Niger)."
Rotary works with the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control and UNICEF, he said.
When they met, Smith asked permission to tell her story as he promoted Rotary's goal.
"She told me, ‘As long as it's not about me, but about polio.'"
Mason became an honorary member of Shelby Rotary Club. Members honored her as a Paul Harris Fellow and gave her a medallion on a ribbon that she could wear, but it hung on her wall.
Smith's own medal, much older and heavier, pinned on, he said, and Mason offered hers for him to wear at Rotary functions.
"I was honored. And as I was leaving, she said something I couldn't hear."
Smith stepped closer and got an example of Mason's sense of humor.
"She said, ‘Don't get gravy on it!'"
Mason told an ABC News reporter just before her 71st birthday, "My story's been one of joy, one of wonderful experiences. It has not been perfect. But that's what people need to understand - that I have had a good life."
