Late Friday afternoon I was driving with my daughter. She asked if I was going to watch Stand Up 2 Cancer that evening. I said yes but that it was going to be hard. You see my mother died of cancer. My wife’s father died of cancer. My daughter said she guess she understood. The thing is someday she probably will. As we all learned that night or at least those who did not know already, everyone gets touched by cancer eventually.
When the show began I was where I am most nights at eight o’ clock, I was washing dinner dishes. I looked up and saw the people in the stands as they asked that every other person sit down. As I listened to one person after the next tell who in their lives had already been lost salty tears reached my lips. Ever time someone said "my mom" the tears grew stronger. I remember my mother taking care of a neighbor’s wife as she whittled away from cancer. My aunt on my mother’s side was more than emaciated by the time she passed. I remember saying good-bye to my own mother while she could still understand. The more I watched the more it reminded me of other telethons gone by.
Then it happened. As I wiped up the stove Eddie Canter’s voice came over the TV. I looked up to see an old Phillips style radio. Mr. Canter was asking everyone to send in a dime. He was telling America that if everyone would send in a dime we could cure infantile paralysis. That was 1938 and they still called polio infantile paralysis. I know a lot about the March of Dimes, so when I heard that first appeal I began to weep. Tears streaming down face I continued my cleaning. When I was done I sat down to watch the rest of the show. One after another people came on to tell us that we can cure cancer the same way.
My first braces were paid for by the March of Dimes. My mother used to tell me I had been in the running to be the March of Dimes poster child. I don’t know whether that was true or something a mother told a nine year old who was scared because he was being put backed into his leg brace. I do remember going door to door collecting for the March of Dimes. Most of all, I know that the March of Dimes was a success. Only not in time for me, see the polio vaccine was announced on April 12th 1955. I contracted polio on or about May 16, 1955. In fact I was vaccinated a couple days earlier only I was already infected it just hadn’t gone active.
I don’t know how long cancer has been around but polio was first described clinically in 1789. The first epidemic in the United States was in 1894. So it took science and the American people just 61 years after the first epidemic to find a vaccine. But that was back when America did great things like winning two world wars and climbing out of the depths of a depression. It was back just before we put a man on the moon. Back before politics divided us into the haves and the have-nots, the religious and the secular, straight and gay.
So before some comes along and describes SU2C as just another publicity grabbing event by the Hollywood elite think about that, 61 years from first epidemic to a vaccine that has the ability to wipe polio off the face the earth. Notice I said wipe not wiped, you see world politics, politics of rich nation versus poor nation has kept polio alive, in under developed countries. So when we reach that day when we cure cancer let us make sure we cure it for all the world, not just some of it.