“No child should die in the dawn of life.”
Those words from St. Jude founder Danny Thomas are the ideal and essentially the foundation upon which St. Jude was built.
Major Gift Advisor for St. Jude Colin Lee expanded on that ideal as he was the guest speaker at Thursday’s weekly Greenville Rotary Club Meeting.
In his role, Lee helps to support St. Jude donors in Mississippi, Kentucky, Tennessee aligned in philanthropic interests with the lifesaving work of the hospital.
Prior, he worked for Feeding America, Southwest Virginia, and taught English at Ferrum College and Hollins University, located in Virginia.
Lee talked about what inspired Thomas and how that inspiration has made St. Jude the hospital it is today, which is much more than just a hospital.
St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital exists to find cures and save children’s lives for pediatric and childhood cancer and other catastrophic diseases.
As passionate as Thomas was about show business and the entertainment industry, he was equally passionate about the well being and lives of children and Lee began by illustrating that point.
“Thomas was an aspiring actor who had a $75 hospital bill to pay,” Lee said. “He needed the money, but couldn’t find it acting so as he was in church one day, to the patron saint of lost causes, St. Jude, he prayed, ‘If you show me my way in life, I will build you a shrine.’”
Lee went on to say Thomas also had an outstanding job offer from his father-in-law.
The next week however, Thomas got a job offer as a singing toothbrush in a radio commercial and it paid $75.
Thomas took that as a sign and passed on his father-in-law’s offer and went on to pursue his entertainment career.
Although he had many movies and TV specials and close affiliations with the “Rat-pack,” Lee said, “Thomas never forgot that first promise that he made to St. Jude.”
Once he achieved his status and his fame, he contacted his spiritual advisor and said, “I wanna honor this pledge that I made, I wanna build a shrine to St. Jude, I want to build a church.”
His spiritual advisor told him there’s too many churches and he didn’t need to build another one, but build a living shrine — a hospital.
Thomas took that to heart and he identified what was the lost cause of that time — the most common form of childhood cancer, acute lymphoblastic leukemia.
At that point in time, that condition had a 4% survival rate and in the early 50s, a diagnosis of childhood cancer was practically a death sentence, according to Lee.
Despite those unfortunate odds, Thomas believed they could make a difference so he and his wife traveled the country raising awareness and support for Thomas’ vision and building a mass network of believers.
All of the leg work they did paid off and in 1962, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital opened in Memphis in the shape of a five pointed star representing a beacon of hope shining for children all over the world.
The catalyst for Thomas’ vision was a profound principle he adopted — “I’d rather receive $1 from a million people than receive a million dollars from one person.”
Lee said about 70% of the hospital’s effort focuses on childhood cancer; the other 30% is concentrated in hematological disorders or blood disorders such as hemophilia, sickle cell anemia and other infectious diseases.
From its start in 1962, St. Jude has focused efforts on the most common form of cancer — acute lymphoblastic leukemia.
Through those efforts over nearly 60 years, St. Jude has raised the survival rate from 4% to 94% for that particular disease.
For all forms of cancer, and overall, St. Jude has raised the survival rate from 20% to 80%.
One Rotarian asked Lee what made Danny Thomas choose Memphis as the location for St. Jude.
Lee responded, “Samuel Stritch, a native of Tennessee and Thomas’ spiritual advisor was the reason for that.”
Lee explained Thomas wanted to put the hospital in a place where it would make a difference not only in the medical landscape, but also in the social community aspect, so, Stritch advised him to go to Memphis.
Thomas went to Memphis at the height of the civil rights era, even though he was considering St. Louis as well.
“While Thomas was in Memphis, there was a young African American boy who was hit by a car while riding his bicycle and all of the hospitals there turned him away and the little boy died as a result,” Thomas said.
According to Lee, Thomas said, “We’re gonna build this hospital here and we’re not going to turn away any child regardless of race, religion or their family’s ability to pay.”
“Sickle cell anemia, as it predominantly affects minority populations has been part of St. Jude’s treatment protocols from the very beginning,” Lee said.
When Thomas died in 1991, the news clipping of the little boy’s death was found inside his wallet.
Lee shared that incident was the emotional motivation behind Thomas choosing Memphis as the St. Jude site, but he also wanted a place that was located in the center of the United States.
Lee also discussed the future of St. Jude, its progression, and how the hospital is making strides to spread that progression abroad.
“There’s a lot of work that we do outside the field of cancer that a lot of people don’t know about,” Lee said.
He acknowledged how he’d heard a child from the Western Line School District had died recently who was being treated at St. Jude.
Lee said it just goes to show their work is not done.
While the survival rate has been raised from 20% to 80%, Lee said, “If only 80 percent survives, that means every one out of five children loses the battle to their disease, and if you’re the parent or the family of that child, four out of five isn’t good enough. That’s why we continue to do our work and continue to do our research.”
Lee highlighted how fortunate the U.S. is as a country to have St. Jude, while the survival rate in other countries across the world is practically flip-flopped at around 20%.
Because of that harsh reality, Lee said it is why St. Jude freely shares the discoveries it makes and the information it gathers.
In addition, St. Jude partners with hospitals around the world teaching the same processes and techniques to help those countries build up a robust research and clinical program to improve survival rates.
Many of those processes are attributed to Dr. Don Pinkel, the first scientist to come to St. Jude, and who was an expert in chemotherapy as medicine.
Lee shared when Pinkel agreed to work for Thomas, everyone told him he was insane to do so and was throwing everything away he’d worked for.
Contrary to those beliefs, Pinkel was a believer of Thomas’ vision and his processes are still being used today.
“There are certainly other hospitals that are focused on treating children, we are a specialty hospital, so St. Jude is where those hospitals send their toughest cases; the most rare and difficult to treat forms of cancer come to St. Jude,” Lee said.
In the case of acute lymphoblastic leukemia, St. Jude developed an approach called the total therapy approach, which was Dr. Pinkel’s approach, and has shared that clinical approach with doctors all around the world.
Thomas is the sole visionary founder of St. Jude and has children who are still very much involved today, one being actress Marlo Thomas who serves as the hospital’s national director of outreach and frequently appears on commercials for St. Jude’s ad campaigns.
