MARLO THOMAS: EPISODE LINK

ST. JUDE: LINK

TRANSCRIPT:

Colleen: It will be 40 years that I’ve been donating to St. Jude. It’s a special, I mean, you

know, it’s just an incredible place. Bridgett has a family member. Currently there

right now.

Marlo Thomas: Wow.

Bridgett:  My cousin’s granddaughter is currently at St.

Jude’s.

Marlo Thomas:  what’s her diagnosis?

Bridgett: It is Medullolastoma. Her name is Hazel Chan.

I talked to her grandfather, and he said he really feels like that’s why she’s

here. It’s because of St. Jude.

Marlo Thomas: Oh, God bless. God bless her. I hope she does

well.

Colleen: Yes. It’s amazing. And I, you know, so many people have heard of St. Jude,

but I don’t know that they really understand the story behind it and the promise

and the prayer from your dad. And if you could indulge us, could you just share a

little bit about how St. Jude was started and by your father, Danny Thomas? I think

the most important part of the story is that my father grew up in an immigrant

neighborhood. You know, he was a first generation American. His parents came from

Lebanon with nothing but their belongings in cloth sacks. And they settled in Toledo,

Ohio, where there was a huge immigrant community. And nobody had any money.

Nobody ever went to the doctor. My grandmother and my father’s mother had 10 babies,

nine boys and a girl without a doctor, just her sister and some hot water. And

that was the way I went, no doctors. So children in his neighborhood died of things

like appendicitis and influenza. So my dad got a real front row seat at the

inequity of health care in this country. And also at the, an imprint really on his

heart and soul.

But he got so successful, he figured he, St. Jude deserved a little more. So he

was going to build this hospital. And the exciting part for him, he wanted to build

a hospital for children of all creeds, religions, nationalities,

race, and that, no, they wouldn’t pay for anything. And that not paying for anything

included travel, you know, the parents and the child that travel to the hospital in

Memphis and treatment.

We’ve kept the promise. And what makes it extremely expensive is that St.

Jude is a Children’s Research Hospital. Research is a key word.

And the brilliance of my dad, who, by the way, didn’t finish high school, put

putting both the research center and the treatment center under one roof so that the

scientists and the researchers are working on things that nobody’s worked on before

and they’re moving it right to the clinic.

and it was on 10 acres. Now it’s 110 acres and 30 buildings.

But what’s important is what’s in those buildings. Scientists and researchers working

24 -7 to get some recipes and cocktails, as they call them,

made, and try them in the clinic with the children who’ve been given really death

sentences by other hospitals. I gave a small fundraiser the other day here in my

apartment. And whenever we do any fundraising, we always have a child and a parent

come. Because I’m not the story of St. Jude. A child and a parent is the story of

St. Jude, just like your cousin’s grandchild. And so this woman got up.

She is a cardiologist. She and her husband are both doctors. They live in New York.

They’re pretty well connected and they had a baby at six weeks old the baby was

found

these doctors, they went around and did other hospitals and so forth. And it was

all the same. The diagnosis was the same as you can’t do any more for a six -week

child. So she contacted St. Jude, and our doctor said,

well, we don’t know, but bring her, let’s try. And she was here. She was seven

years old, seven years old. And that, to me, is the story of St. Judes makes

me cry every time. And when people say to me, how do you keep going? How do you

keep all this passion? And it’s been like 33, 34 years since my father died. That’s

how. Just listen to these stories. Listen to these moms and dads. And the father

told us that night that they had already paid for the plot,

the burial plot for their six -week -old baby. So, yeah, So that’s who we are.

That’s what we do. And it’s priceless. But we still have to raise the money.

And it costs us $7 million a day. Seven million a day. And because of all these

researchers and scientists that come from all over the world to do their best work

and create the best trials and the best treatments that they can to move over to

the clinic. So it’s really, it’s a blur.

because it’s about food and you don’t have to buy any presents. And so it takes

all the pressure off. Anyway, so we decided we do a retail program.

So just follow the people to the malls because that’s where they’re going. And so

we signed up so many wonderful partners like Home Goods and Williams- Sonoma and,

oh gosh, I don’t even have all of them listed here. And then, what do you call

it, restaurants like Dominoes and Chilis. And then, of course, K -Jewelers and just so

many partners. And when you go to their stores or their restaurants, they’re going

to ask you, as a customer, would you like to add a little something to your bill

for the children of St. Jude? So it’s very easy. It’s a skew. They hit it. You

add a dollar, $5, $20, $20 .50, whatever you want. And it goes straight to

Jude, to help us pay for the science and the research and the treatment and the

care and the housing and the food of these families.

Bridgett: Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, just hearing from my cousin and finding out what is involved with that,

her granddaughter qualified for research. And that is why she got in. And so just

like you were saying, just everything that is involved.

it costs a lot of money.

Marlo Thomas: Insurance doesn’t cover hardly any of it or some of it,

and there’s a million reasons why it doesn’t cover this one or this surgery or this

treatment or whatever. But at St. Jude, we don’t have those decisions to make.

We just pay for it all. And the parents come not only terrified that their child

might not make it, but terrified that they’re going to have to mortgage their house

and sell their car and cash in their 401k,

children are way more courageous than the parents. You know, they just are, I get

such a kick out of seeing a little six -year -old, seven -year -old boy walking down

the hall with his arm around a four -year -old kid, sort of telling him like, you

know, they’ve just come to boot camp, you know, where the things are, where you get

a candy bar and all this stuff. It’s just adorable. And, you know, we do everything

we can to try to make it less of a hospital. I don’t know if you ever seen

pictures of St. Jude,

appointments and away from their radiation and chemo and treatments and all, which is

a full day. They get to have a couple of hours at the Family Commons to do what

they want to do and takes them away from the stress of having these treatments.

And I’m very excited by that. It’s only about a year old. And I had a hand in

designing it. And it’s one of my favorite places. Oh, and also there’s about 20

little nooks where the family can have a spot.

Colleen: And I love, you were saying there really aren’t doctors and

nurses there, so they’re not going to see that part of, you know, the hospital

experience. They have a hair salon. And a nail salon. I mean, it’s just all these

things that no one thinks about when a child is going through this, that they just

want to feel like they’re a part of a community. And they just feel like a normal

kid.

Marlo Thomas:  Well, hair is very important to children going through chemo. I mean,

they lose their hair. I’ve seen little girls,

their immune system compromised from the chemo. So, yeah, and it’s interesting

because a lot of people, grown -ups and children who get cancer, get other diseases

from that compromised immune system. So we’re into those as well.

And you have to be really careful to when they’re in that state about who comes in

and out and visits.

Bridgett:  And that has to be so difficult to have for families.

Marlo Thomas: And also with…

Those that have been lost, and they write their name on a balloon, and then they send

the balloon to heaven. It’s really a beautiful ceremony. Barbara Bush came with Jenna

Bush, and she wrote Robin on a balloon. Her daughter, I think, was six or seven

years old, many, many years ago. But she still did it just a couple years ago, and

we watched Robin’s balloon go up. But on Survivor Day, people come,

who are now in their 60s, who had that other kind of radiation. And you can see,

I don’t think there’s even a proton beam in New York. People go to Florida for the

proton beam. It’s a very expensive machine, and no hospital here has been willing to

put in that kind of money. But we are, we are so ambitious when it comes to

saving children’s lives. And that’s why we find our scientists and our researchers

from all over the world. We have a hall in one of our research towers that has

all the flags of our faculty. And there’s hundreds of them. They come from Portugal

and China and Ukraine and everywhere. And it’s like Babylon when you go to the

science labs. Everybody’s talking a different language. But they’re brilliant and they

collaborate. And That really is the secret of good science is collaboration.

In fact, AML, Acute Myeloid Leukemia, is a real rough one.

ALL, acute lymphoblastic leukemia, we’ve pretty much conquered that. When my dad

opened the hospital in 62, there was a 4 % survival rate. About 10 years ago,

we got to a 94 % survival rate. But that still means 6 % are dying,

and that 6 % is very important.

And the way that happened was by us collaborating with nine other hospitals so to

collect patients. You know, you have to have a population of

patients to do a trial, and you could never do that at one hospital. So we

gathered 200 patients from nine other universities and hospitals,

and so we had a population from which to try these trials and found that we can

cure 88 percent.

Parents come in and their little kids look so sick, and I see them. And then I would say a little

prayer, oh, please, God, please God save this child. And then I come back about a

year later, eight months later, and that kid is skipping around, feeling good,

playing with the dog, they’re going to go home for the holidays. And I think, oh,

Daddy, what you’ve done here? God bless you, you know, and that’s the excitement,

the pure excitement of St. Jude.

They’re part of their school. And they graduate. We have graduations, which

is great. We have a prom night for all the teenagers. We put on a prom night. And

The wonderful people of Lancome come and they

make up all the girls and we bring in prom dresses and they have a date or not a

date, but it’s a prom. So we try to cover it all.

Colleen: But what can people who are listening to this do with

the Thanks and Giving, because I’ve been store shopping and

it so we can attest that they are doing it. And they can do the monthly donation.

Is there something else that they can do? Is there a different way they can raise

funds for St. Jude.

Marlo Thomas: Well, you can go to StJude.org and make a donation. You can

be a part of our walkathons and bikeathons and whatever, you know,

those walk, those “athons”  and they’re all over the country. I know they

have big ones in Boston and New York and Chicago and Los Angeles. And if you don’t

have one in your city, you could start one. You know, I often hear from people who

say, oh, we don’t have one here in Minneapolis. And so they start one. And,

you know, you start one with maybe 50 people. And before you know it, it’s 1 ,500

people, and before you know it, it’s 10 ,000 and so forth and so on.  I

think if you go to StJude.org, you might look at what are the different ways

in which people raise money. You can also, I have a friend, Sally, who lives in

Dallas, and she gives a fundraiser every year. She used to be on our board,

and she gives a fundraiser every year in her house and I make a, what do you call

it, a little video for her because I’ve known her for so many years. And she

raises a couple hundred thousand dollars with the ladies that they’re raising money

somewhere too, and then they’re coming to her house and bringing it. And then they

have an auction and they get people in their neighborhood to donate a purse or a

car or a pair of gloves or whatever. And they auction those off. So there’s a lot

of ways, you know, that you can

other housings. Target also built two houses for about 100 families,

I think it is. And they have some one bedrooms there and two bedrooms.

This is the only one, I think, that has three bedrooms. And then the sorority Tri

-Delta, they also built a house, and those girls raised money. And the Ronald

McDonald House in the area gave us their house for our patients. But what’s the

most important thing I think that I think distinguishes us from every other hospital

in the country is our research. Our research and our science and the respect we

have for them and the excitement they have to come to know they’ll be funded and

they can use those laser brains of theirs, you know, to come up with a new way to

treat (children) like your cousin’s grandchild.

Colleen:  Your father, would he be blown away by now?

Marlo Thomas: Oh, I think he was, like my brother

and sister and I talk all the time. What would it be like to bring Daddy through

this place?

So imagine a small building on 10 acres and now he walks in here and there’s 30

buildings and 110 acres. You know, when he built the hospital, I think the budget

was $250 ,000 a year.

We have a patient from Ukraine who was being treated for a disease and they found that He had a different disease. So now he’s

being treated for the disease that he actually has. So there’s a really interesting,

you know, stories of what parents go through with these sick children.

Bridgett:  You know, and just the fact that St. June is so collaborative, that you

break down barriers, that there’s no gatekeeping. That is amazing.

And look what you get from that. You’re going to find some doctor somewhere who can treat the disease.

Colleen: I mean, as the National Outreach Director, you must, this must be full time

all day, but that you experience and you get to touch these families lives.

It must be so fulfilling for you.

Marlo Thomas: Oh, it is. It is. It’s not all day, every day,

but it’s a lot of the day. You know,

I say it’s truly a blessing for me. You know, I mean, you wonder why you were

born, right? You wonder what you’re here for. What is the good you’re doing? And I

have a great belief in people and a great belief in the American people.

And I think we’re good people. And we want to do good. We just don’t know how.

You know, it’s like you were saying before, what can people do? I hear that

question a lot. And I think the desire to do good is a great beginning.

And then you find out, well, there’s something I could do that would be good. And

I’d like to point to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital as a way for you to

fulfill the goodness that you have in your heart. And we get a lot of very

wonderful people involved with St. Jude because they want to do good.

If you look at the nurses that we have, they’re very, very loving. And you see the

children when they’ve been away and they come back to the hospital, they run to

these nurses and grab them by the legs. They can’t wait to be hugged and kissed by

them. There’s a tremendous feeling of connection and love. And it’s funny.

I have such a funny story about this. I often tell people that you’ll rarely hear

children crying at St. Jude. You just don’t hear it. And because even when we give

a child a shot, we numb the area. In fact, one of the fathers said to me one

time, he said, “I know this is a small thing.” He said, “but at the other hospital

we were at, my kid was always screaming from the shots. But here, you numb the

area.” He said, “why doesn’t everybody just you know numb them.” I have no idea why, I’m a

fundraiser. So they numb the area, so you don’t hear a lot of crying. So one day I’m

in the elevator, and I was being interviewed by CBS Sunday morning show, and the

woman was following me around the hospital. So we get into the elevator, and this

mother comes in with this screaming child. This kid is screaming and crying after I

just told this reporter that children never cry at St. Jude. So I was kind of

embarrassed and I said to the mother, oh, what’s the matter with her? She said, oh,

we’re supposed to go home today and she just doesn’t want to go home.

She wants to stay with her friends. Friends, yeah. Yeah. And I thought, wow, that’s

the best answer on the planet.

Bridgett: Yeah. That’s so great. That turned it right around.

Colleen:  I think also, you know, your father obviously created such a

legacy, but it must be a little genetic because you, from a very early age,

you were a feminist, you wanted to change the way we viewed, you know, with Free

to Be You and Me. So you’ve always kind of had that drive to change the narrative

around things.

Marlo Thomas: Well, I think what my father gave us was the idea that,

We can do it. But it takes all of us together to make that

happen. And we’re all part of it. You know, the guy at the gate, he’s saving

children’s lives. The guy who’s sweeping up in the cafeteria, he’s saving children’s

lives. And I think I’m saving children’s lives. And you two are right now by

allowing me to talk to your listeners. We’re all in this community of saving

children’s lives and when none of us can do it without the other one. We can’t

do this all alone you know. The Today Show puts us on every year for 22

years all week of Thanksgiving to tell a child’s story every day because as I said

before that’s the story of St. Jude ,a child’s story, not my story.

I was on The Drew Barrymore show. She’s now one of our ambassadors. She’s the cutest

person in the whole world.

She is so authentic. That’s really who she is. And it’s interesting because she

comes from a very sort of scattered childhood. And she was like a movie star at

three years old. And she’s as innocent and kind, just a lovely, lovely woman.

So there’s so many people who want to help. And all together, we’re doing it.

But we can’t do it alone. That’s for sure.

Colleen: And I think that that, you know, we

always see, if you watch the commercials, you’ll always see a well -known actor or

actress really emotionally saying, please come a member.

Marlo Thomas: And they just do it for the love, like you said, to be a part of this.

People ask me sometimes, how much do you make a year? I said, me? I’m a lowly

volunteer. I don’t make any money. I pay my own way. And I, my father used to say,

not even a hamburger. You don’t even charge a hamburger to St. Jude. We need every

dollar. You know, our board doesn’t get paid. You know, people on boards, they get

paid or their travel gets paid. Our board does not get paid. We don’t pay for

their travel. We don’t pay for their food or their hotel. Everybody is a volunteer.

That’s the way we have to run it.

Colleen: Is there going to be more growth coming in the next couple of years?

Marlo Thomas: Yes.

Well, right now, I think they did a drone shot on the Today Show,

we’ve got about three towers going up right now to hold science. I think two are

for science and one is one more for children and doctors. We’re in a $12 billion

expansion at the moment. And when we finish these last towers, then thankfully we’ll

be done with this expansion. But we raised the money to do it and we’re doing it.

We need it and when the scientists

Are changing lives every single day.

Colleen: what a gift to be able to do that

just and we appreciate you coming on and talking to us and sharing this information

and hopefully our listeners will go check out the website we’ll have the links.

Marlo Thomas: Thank you go to home goods and William Sonoma and Pottery Barn and

uh and round up them to spend money are so many people, Kay Jewelers and of course

Expedia does it online. And there’s so much going online, which is great.

But they’re very generous people, these companies. And there’s a lot of them. So I

can’t read 40 names. But if you go to St.Jude.org, it will give you all the names

of the companies.

Colleen: That’s what I was going to say is it on St. Jude’s website that

people can go and see it’s through the

holidays, right?

Marlo Thomas: Yeah. Uh -huh. Yeah. Absolutely.

about saving their child’s life. And so that’s why our motto is “Give thanks for the

healthy kids in your life and give to those who are not.” Give to those families

who right now can’t even think about buying presents. All they can think about is

how do I get my child through this next round of the trial? How do I keep my

child alive? That’s a big, it’s a big Christmas and Hanukkah present to keep your

child alive.

Bridgett: Absolutely. Absolutely

Marlo Thomas: Thank you so much for coming on. Thank you,

Colleen, Bridgett.