1955 swizzle party

I have zero idea why my grandmother or great-grandmother kept this invitation and pasted it into a scrapbook. It's for a one-hour "Swizzle Party" (there were some issues on the spelling) starting at 6:30 p.m. on May 23, 1955, at Waterloo House. I assume that just means a cocktail party, possibly with a focus on rum. That date was a Monday, which I guess is a little interesting.

On that date, the Page 1 banner two-deck headline in the Lancaster Intelligencer Journal screamed "PENTAGON REPORTED SHOCKED BY ADVANCES IN SOVIET AIR MIGHT." Perhaps a little too alarmist in retrospect?

Much lower on the front page is a one-column article with the headline: "GOV'T AWAITING FRESH ADVICE ON RESUMING SHOTS" This concerns the initial distribution of the polio vaccine. After Jonas Salk’s inactivated polio vaccine was declared safe and effective in April 1955, mass immunization began almost immediately. Several companies were licensed to produce the vaccine. Within weeks, however, cases of paralytic polio began appearing in children who had just been vaccinated. Investigations traced the problem to vaccine lots produced by Cutter Laboratories.  

Michael Fitzpatrick, writing for the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, further explains: "In April 1955 more than 200,000 children in five Western and mid-Western USA states received a polio vaccine in which the process of inactivating the live virus proved to be defective. Within days there were reports of paralysis and within a month the first mass vaccination programme against polio had to be abandoned. Subsequent investigations revealed that the vaccine, manufactured by the California-based family firm of Cutter Laboratories, had caused 40,000 cases of polio, leaving 200 children with varying degrees of paralysis and killing 10."

Tighter federal regulation and oversight soon remedied the situation and safe polio vaccinations resumed. The United States has been polio-free since 1979 and the Americas have been polio-free since 1994.