SWEET TEA: She didn’t wonder ‘why me?’

— Joyce Price’s first last name rhymes with her second last name: When she was 17, she traded in Cullins for Sullins.

To increase the potential for confusion, both her father and her husband were named Fred, and their middle initial was “J,” which, mercifully, is where the similarities end.

Her father’s middle name was James; her husband’s, Juneway. (Juneway was born in June; his sister was Bertha May. Two guesses.)

The marriage of F. J.

Cullins’ daughter to F. J.

Sullins, which ended after 25 years, is irrelevant to the point of Joyce’s call.

But like my wife’s Aunt Edith, who married two men named Slim and is buried between them, that piece of Joyce’s history is worth a mention.

The point of Joyce’s call was polio, which she contracted in 1940 at the age of 2. The polio left a reminder: Her left leg is about an inch-and-half shorter than her right, and her left ankle is paralyzed.

She had just recovered from spinal meningitis, and in that weakened condition picked up the polio virus.

“I wore a brace for a long time,” Joyce told the Arkansas Democrat when she was in the eighth grade, “even slept in it, but now I can walk without even a limp.”

At 72, however, she walks with a cane, though she is supposed to wear a brace.

“I’m naughty,” she says.

I met Joyce around a lunch table, where the group included her brother, John Cullins, and his wife, Willie; Joyce’s sister, Martha; and Martha’s friend, Sylvia Moore, who was there to buy two copies of her children’s book, Patience, a subject Joyce is life-certified to discuss.

Martha and John, who weren’t walking the earth when Joyce contracted polio, say she never let her leg slow her down.

She jumped rope, and played hopscotch, hide and seek, and a baseball game called scrub-up: Catch three flies, and you go to bat.

Joyce didn’t bat much, her siblings report.

“I never said, ‘Why me?’,” Joyce says. “It’s something that happened. Some people lived in an iron lung.”

She and Juneway had five children, and she has seven grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

Joseph Walker Price, her second husband, died several years ago.

In the way that the polio left its mark, so did the dissolution of her first marriage. Her smile gleamed from her eyes the other day as she recounted the day Juneway showed up at her house in a green convertible. She was 16.

“Oh, he was good looking,” she says. “Coalblack hair, blue eyes, the most beautiful quirky grin.”

Though she forgave him after the divorce, she says, a bit of hurt lingered. She pointed at her chest when she said that.

But God, she says, took care of that for her. Three years ago, Joyce Cullins/ Sullins/Price moved to Newport, where she helped care for a struggling June. His death hurt more than she expected, but as the grief subsides, an unexpected peace resides.

Arkansas, Pages 7 on 07/27/2010

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