For almost 45 years, Labor Day weekend has been associated with the Muscular Dystrophy Association and with Jerry Lewis, the comedian who hosted the fund-raising television entertainment spectacle credited with raising billions of dollars for research and services to sufferers.

But a lad of shadowy origins born in Central Texas about 75 years ago was the first face of MDA for national audiences and the organization used his plight to raise not only awareness of the constellation of neuromuscular diseases, but also millions of dollars.

The front page headline in the Waco Times Herald of April 17, 1956, was pithy yet full of pathos: “WACO FOUNDLING: Pneumonia kills ‘poster boy.’ ”

Sen Marion Price Daniel II (left) greets muscular dystrophy patient Raymond Waller, of Port Arthur, circa 1955.

Film and TV star Roy Rogers (inset) sends 18th birthday greetings to Waller, who was dying from muscular dystrophy that had been diagnosed when he was 4 years old. Waller was abandoned as a baby in a Waco movie theater and later adopted by Louise and J.N. Waller, of Port Arthur.

The previous day, after a life of less than 20 years, the paper said, Raymond Waller died in Port Arthur, home of his adoptive mother, Louise.

Waller, 19, had been the National Muscular Dystrophy Research Foundation’s poster boy since the organization’s founding in 1950. He was diagnosed with MD at age 4, and by age 13 was so wasted by the disease that he was confined first to a wheelchair, and quickly thereafter to his bed.

When he died less than a day after developing pneumonia, journalists reported, he weighed less than 40 pounds.

Waller had been adopted by Louise and J.N. Waller of Port Arthur in the late 1930s, from a Catholic orphanage in Austin called Home of the Holy Infancy (now known as Marywood Children and Family Services, founded in 1921).

The youth had been found abandoned as an infant in a Waco movie theater with no more identification on him than a Catholic religious medal. The nuns at Providence, Waco’s Catholic hospital, moved him to the orphanage in Austin.

The story told by Louise Waller in promotional materials for the National Muscular Dystrophy Research Foundation was that after losing a son at birth and being told she couldn’t bear another, she was summoned to the orphanage to take her pick of two youngsters.

“One was a healthy baby of two weeks and the other was a spindly-legged boy of nine months whose large eyes followed her as she walked between the two cribs,” the story said. “She went to the chapel and prayed. Then she knew. She took the thin boy whom the others had passed up.”

Although he survived that bout of the rickets under his new mother’s ministrations, Raymond Waller was was eventually diagnosed with progressive muscular dystrophy.

“Raymond fell an early victim to the crippling disease that afflicts some 200,000 people in the U.S. and for which neither cause nor cure is known,” Time magazine reported on April 30, 1956.

Meanwhile, a pair of sisters from Liberty County — Nadine and Sallie Woods, themselves afflicted with the mysterious crippling malady — in 1950 chartered the National Muscular Dystrophy Research Foundation with the mission of finding a cure.

Waller was age 13 when National Muscular Dystrophy Research Foundation began using him as the public face of the disease. He was the organization’s “poster boy” until his death in 1956.

Promotional literature from the National Muscular Dystrophy Research Foundation, founded in Texas in 1950, raised funds through raising fright.