ZELIENOPLE — Tom and Marie Grant, both members of the Zelienople Rotary Club, are active in the community.

The two have been involved by being a hosting family for visiting international Rotary members and students, being an international Rotary ambassador and doing charity work for ShelterBox USA.

Tom Grant earlier this year earned his fourth consecutive President’s Volunteer Service Award for the latter.

Starting this month the Grants will add to that activism by helping to revitalize and co-chair the Rotary District Committee on Polio. They plan to raise money and awareness for polio.

This is a personal mission for Tom.

His wife said, “Tom and I have done a number of presentations for Rotary Clubs for the End Polio Now campaign.”

For Tom Grant, who is the Zelienople club’s president, this is a personal cause because he is a polio survivor.

He was diagnosed with the debilitating disease in September 1953 when he was 17 years old. At the time, he played football at Ridley Township High School in Delaware County, Pa.

He was the 40th polio case in that county that year, according to the newspaper in the township.

“I was going into school to have our last football practice before our first game. My legs were aching and it got worse during the day,” he said of how he felt. “I remember getting up sometime in the evening to walk because my legs hurt so bad. I lifted my left leg and I fell down.”

The next morning, a doctor visited Grant’s home and diagnosed him with the disease. He had to use a full leg brace, but he was back in school by November that year.

The March of Dimes, founded by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who himself had polio, helped Grant by giving him a hospital bed and financial aid.

Years later, Grant began experiencing symptoms of post-polio syndrome and was diagnosed in 2001. By 2006, he had to use braces to help him walk.

He and Marie Grant have been married for about 23 years.

“When I first met him, he didn’t use any aids for walking at all,” Marie Grant said. “Gradually, he started using a walking stick and then a cane.”

Although the development of vaccines in the 1950s led to the U.S. being declared polio-free in 1994, the disease hurts other areas across the world.

Polio is considered an endemic in Pakistan and Afghanistan by the World Health Organization.

They hope to visit all 42 Rotary clubs in District 7280 to educate people not only on polio, but also about the struggle polio survivors face. The district includes clubs from Pine-Richland School District in Allegheny County in the south to Erie in the north.

“There’s a general ignorance about polio,” Tom Grant said. “There are about 2 million polio survivors in the U.S. now.”

While the Rotary district always has had a chairman for the committee, the Grants hope to make it more active than ever before.

“It’s been inactive for a while,” Tom Grant said.

They were appointed to the committee by newly elected Rotary District Governor Tom Chelgren.

“This is one of the most perfect and most in-tune teams I have seen in action,” Chelgren said of the two.

Chelgren said he first met Tom Grant a few years ago in Punxsutawney with the ShelterBox project. Chelgren is a member of the Punxsutawney Rotary Club.

“He came to Punxsutawney as part of our summer festival, and he outworked 90 percent of the people who I was affiliated with in our organization, standing on crutches,” he said. “The man’s perseverance and dedication with everything he is involved with is so noteworthy.”

Since 1985 Rotary Clubs has been focused on ending polio. For every $1 Rotary collects, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation gives $2.

“There is a support group in Rotary International for polio survivors,” Marie Grant said. “I don’t think it’s common knowledge. It’s Rotary’s mission to get the word out there.”

For information on Rotary’s campaign to end polio, visit www.endpolionow.org.