For a child of the 1940s or ’50s, polio meant the same thing whether you contracted it or not: confinement.

The Milton Bradley executive Mel Taft said that Abbott, the inventor of Candy Land, was “a real sweetheart” whom he liked immediately. According to Walsh, the toy historian, the two met when Abbott brought Milton Bradley a Candy Land prototype sketched on butcher paper. “Eleanor was just as sweet as could be,” Taft recalled. “She was a schoolteacher who lived in a very modest home in San Diego.”

Details about her life outside this interaction are scant. Curators at the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, New York, say that the museum has no holdings in its extensive archives from Abbott’s records; they rely on Walsh’s account. Walsh told me that Taft was his only source, and Hasbro, which now owns Milton Bradley, did not respond to a request for records that might verify Abbott as the game’s inventor. Among the few facts researchers have unearthed about her: A phone book containing her number exists in the collections of the San Diego Historical Society (the only trace of her in its archives). And according to some accounts, she gave much of the royalties she earned from Candy Land to children’s charities.

There is reason to believe that Abbott was ideally suited to consider polio from a child’s perspective. As a schoolteacher, she would have been acquainted with children’s thoughts and needs. And in 1948, when she was in her late 30s, she herself contracted the disease. Abbott recuperated in the polio ward of a San Diego hospital, spending her convalescence primarily among children.

Imagine what it must have been like to share an entire hospital ward with children struggling against polio, day after day, as an adult. Kids are poorly equipped to cope with boredom and separation from their loved ones under normal circumstances. But it would be even more unbearable for a child confined to a bed or an iron lung. That was the context in which Abbott made her recovery.

Read: What America looked like: Polio children paralyzed in iron lungs

Seeing children suffer around her, Abbott set out to concoct some escapist entertainment for her young wardmates, a game that left behind the strictures of the hospital ward for an adventure that spoke to their wants: the desire to move freely in the pursuit of delights, an easy privilege polio had stolen from them.

From today’s perspective, it’s tempting to see Candy Land as a tool of quarantine, an excuse to keep kids inside in the way Shepherd remembers. The board game gathers all your children in one place, occupying their time and attention. Samira Kawash, a Rutgers University professor, suggests that this is the main way polio informed the game’s development. “The point of Candy Land is to pass the time,” she writes, “certainly a virtue when one’s days are spent in the boring confines of the hospital and an appealing feature as well of a game used to pass the time indoors for children confined to the house.” For Kawash, Candy Land justifies and extends the imprisonment of the hospital, becoming another means of restriction.