Authors: Nancy G. Brinker
Eric had the same learn-outside-the-classroom style I did. Norman and I expected good grades, and Eric worked hard to deliver, but numbers were hard for him at first.
“If you work hard enough, you can learn anything,” Norman insisted.
“But sometimes you learn it a different way,” I tried to tell him. Norman came from a mindset and a generation where the only two learning disabilities were “lazy” and “stupid,” and Norman knew Eric wasn’t stupid, ergo …
“Three times seventeen,” Norman was constantly drilling. “Six times twelve.”
I had to bite my tongue sometimes. I knew it wasn’t right for me to get in the middle of their relationship, and their relationship overall was pretty great. Eric adopted a stray dog, and Norman was impressed with the patience and responsibility that brought out in Eric. He named it
Underdog—“Undie” for short. The two of them immediately had that “boy and his dog” rapport. Life was a lot of fun. We played polo, traveled, and skied. Brenda, Cindy, and I threw several Annual Forty-Ninth Birthday parties for Norman. We all worked hard, but we always made time for each other.
When Eric was twelve, he wanted to start working for Norman, and Norman agreed to find him something in the mailroom, but he didn’t cut Eric one inch of slack, and I knew I couldn’t either. On the day he was to start work, Eric came into the kitchen freshly scrubbed and ready to take on the world.
“Are you taking me to work or is Dad?” he asked.
“You’re taking the bus,” I said. “And you’d better hurry and pack a lunch. You won’t have any lunch money until you get paid.”
Naturally, Eric reacted as if I’d thrown him off the lifeboat. “You’re so mean!”
“Eric, you don’t want people to see you ride up in the boss’ car. While you’re at work, you’re an employee, and Daddy is Mr. Brinker, just like he is to all the other employees. The only difference is you’ll work twice as hard as anyone else there because you know they’re all watching you.”
He set his jaw, packed his lunch, and went off to meet the bus. It was good for him. Sometimes he didn’t get home until a little later than I would have liked, but he was happy. He quickly made friends with all the regulars on the bus, working people, men, women, young, old, black, white, and Hispanic. They loved him because he was polite and respectful and loved to listen to their stories. Everything was great until the night he didn’t come home. I came unglued.
“Why did you make me do this?” I raged at Norman. “He’s gone! He’s kidnapped!”
Norman went out to look for him, but an hour later, Eric trudged in with his blood-spattered shirt in his hand.
“Oh
my God!
” I ran to him. “What happened? Where are you hurt?”
He wasn’t hurt at all.
“The bus was in an accident,” he said. “A lady got hurt, so I took off my shirt and wrapped it around her.”
Eric wasn’t into polo, but he loved being at the field with us, talking to people, industriously selling programs, and listening in on grown-up
conversation. He and Norman would go out driving on scouting excursions, checking out possible locations for new units. Norman would ask Eric, “What do you think of this corner?” Eric would say, “I like it” or “I don’t know, Dad. Traffic pattern doesn’t look right.”
“He’s got a good eye,” Norman told me. “And I think he’s getting better with his numbers.”
“Business in Wichita is improving,” Eric remarked at dinner one night. “Dallas is taking off too. And Boca Raton is zooming.”
“See?” Norman said proudly. “I told you he was getting better at numbers. He’s been reading the sales reports!”
“Oh, no, Dad,” said Eric. “It’s because I’m in the mailroom. Those receipts are heavier than they used to be.”
We had a good laugh about it, but it was an interesting comment on the way they worked together. They made a good team. Eric saw forests; Norm saw trees.
The numerical and the empirical. The statistical and the anecdotal.
That’s the crux of the ongoing—and going and going—debate about screening. A study pops out, demonstrating with statistics that screening is next to pointless, and on the heels of it come a rush of stories from women whose lives speak quite the contrary. It’s not conflicting information; it’s the same information sifted through two different value systems.
For me, it’s a moot point. What it comes down to is a woman’s right to establish her own value system when it comes to her own body. If she wants a mammogram, she should have a mammogram. That’s what we were fighting for, and the state of Texas was the first to change laws, requiring insurance providers to cover mammograms. In 1992, we helped push through the Mammography Quality Standards Act, which requires facilities and technicians to be meet certain standards to be accredited. (Just the beginning of our continuing quest to make mammography more accurate, more accessible, and more technically precise as a diagnostic tool.)
Meanwhile, Eric grew to be a tall and capable young man. He was becoming more and more frustrated in school, being pulled out of class half the time for tutoring. Searching for resources that might help him, Norman and I heard about Landmark School in Boston, which specializes in teaching high-potential students with learning differences. It was
an adjustment—more for me than for Eric—when he went off to school, but his confidence soared along with his reading and math scores. He was part of a community. He was excelling. I missed seeing him every day, but it was wonderful to hear his voice on the phone, thriving and happy, as he grew by leaps and bounds. We made the most of every weekend and vacation that he spent with us. During the summer, he learned to wait tables and earned his own spending money. When he wanted a car, we told him we’d pay half. He worked hard, saved his money, and ferreted out a secondhand but still functional Jeep. Eric graduated from Landmark and went on to Bradley University in Peoria. He loved being close to Mom and Daddy, who divided their time between Florida and Peoria, and I loved that he was living in the Land of Milk and Honey.
More Race for the Cure events were popping up all over the country—seven in 1990, including the National Race for the Cure in Washington, D.C., where we launched our National Series Breast Cancer Survivor Recognition program with the help of Vice President and Marilyn Quayle. Turnout was massive. Every survivor was given a pink visor, and they were as countless as cherry blossoms. At our Tenth Anniversary Gala in 1992, Senator Connie Mack and his wife, Priscilla, were presented with the Betty Ford Award, with Betty Ford doing the presentation, as always. Vice President and Mrs. Quayle were there, along with President Ford, Nancy Reagan, and Lady Bird Johnson. We presented our first Brinker International Awards for Breast Cancer Research to Dr. Bernard Fisher, who’d advanced the science of adjuvant therapies, and Dr. V. Craig Jordan, who discovered the preventative properties of tamoxifen. Support flooded in from diverse sources, many of whom remain friends and partners to this day, including the Zeta Tau Alpha fraternity and the ZTA Foundation.
SGK was such a huge part of our lives. It would have been impossible for me to have both my family and this all-consuming decade of work had I been married to anyone else. Sitting next to Norman at the monthly board meetings, I’d feel his knee nudging mine. He always held my hand, but kept it under the table, so I wouldn’t look like a woman who needed hand-holding.
Every once in a while, he’d look at me as if I’d hung the moon and say, “I knew you had this in you.”
Over the early years, people kept telling me we’d never survive unless we allowed ourselves to be absorbed by a larger organization, but that was no longer the vision. Our vision was to
be
the larger organization, and instead of absorbing the small foundations that sprang up, we’d help them grow—or at least not get in their way. We’d come a long way in a short time. Now there was no stopping us, and as stingy as we were with our operating costs, we weren’t about to hand a bag of money over to an umbrella organization for the privilege of having them tell us what to do. Our foundation stood on its own feet.
Others keep trying to convince me that what we really need is to build a big building. I see where they’re going with that idea, but why would we invest all that money in a facility that would stand for a hundred years? Our greatest hope is to finish what we came to do, eradicate breast cancer forever, and close up shop. I dream of the day we’re no longer needed. I hope I live to see it. When the work is done, I’ll happily walk away, put my feet up, gaze at some great Hungarian art, and celebrate the promise kept.
SGK celebrated a great milestone in 1991: For the first time, we made more than $1 million in grants funding breast cancer research projects in a single calendar year. The grassroots grew; our corporate partnerships flourished. Every once in a while, I’d remove my nose from the grindstone just long enough to notice how much things had changed.
It was astonishing.
Between the beginning of 1988 and the end of 1992, the world changed more than a little. Tiananmen Square became an icon, apartheid ended, the Warsaw Pact dissolved, the iron curtain collapsed, the Soviet Union foundered and fell apart.
Evolution and revolution everywhere.
And another 215,039 American women died of breast cancer.
“E
VERYBODY HAS
a story about why they do what they do,” says Dr. Fredika Robertson. “Science is a very personal endeavor. Believe me,” she adds wryly, “we’re not in it for the money and glory.”
About fifteen years ago, Dr. Robertson was invited to join an epidemiologist friend in a study related to anti-inflammatories and the cyclooxygenase-2, or “COX-2,” gene.
“I said sure,” says Fredi, and you can hear in her voice how completely fascinated she is with her specialty, molecular biology. “We designed experiments, obtained samples from patients with early metastatic disease, and learned that this COX-2 gene is unregulated in patients whose disease has spread.”
She would go on to establish links between COX-2 and estrogen and the enzyme aromatase, which is key to estrogen production. The study, published in 1997, caught our eye because of promising data we were seeing in the field of aromatase inhibitors. Less than a year later, while conducting a lab meeting, Dr. Robertson reached down to pick up a pen, and everything burst into shooting stars. A tumor in her brain had caused a massive hemorrhage.
“It hurt,” says Dr. Robertson, who is not one for hyperbole.
The physician at the urgent-care “doc-in-a-box” facility happened to be a resident she’d trained. He asked her if she thought she had spinal meningitis.
“No,” Fredi managed. “Do an MRI.”
After what seemed like a long time, she saw a flurry of white coats rushing into the room.
“Later on I saw the brain scans,” she says, “but you can’t even really see the brain. They told me in front of my sixteen-year-old daughter that
I wasn’t going to make it, and I said, ‘No, I don’t accept that.’ That’s something I’ve learned over and over from the patients I’ve worked with. They come into M. D. Anderson with a terrible prognosis, Stage IV, looking for a second opinion after someone told them nothing could be done—and yes, some of them die, but some of them get through it.”
The chemical treatment of the tumor and recovery process that followed was laborious and slow. Fredi sat at the computer for hours, learning her own language from the beginning, her head pounding, the words hanging just out of reach, tantalizing and torturing.
“I’d tell myself
just fifteen minutes more
and after that
just fifteen minutes more
. It took a lot of persistence. I was forty-four years old and learning like a first grader would learn.”
She battled her way back and was eventually able to resume her work.
In August 2008, Dr. Robertson stood in a hangar at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, celebrating the award of the first SGK Promise Grant. Parked out on the tarmac like a mommy, daddy, and half a dozen hatchlings were an American Airlines 757, a 777, and a group of American Eagle commuter jets, gleaming in the sunshine, freshly painted with their new livery. A vivid pink ribbon unfurled the entire length of each fuselage from one end to the other, and each tail fin was emblazoned with our trademark “running ribbon.”
In addition to flying our color all over the world, American Airlines was funding an important five-year study of IBC—inflammatory breast cancer—to the tune of $8 million. Fredi and her co-principal investigator, Dr. Massimo Christofanilli, are conducting transitional research using critical blood and tissue samples from IBC patients, advancing our understanding of the disease and identifying IBC biomarkers.
“The collaboration between patients, physicians, and laboratory scientists has created a one-of-a-kind environment for robust team science,” said Dr. Christofanilli.
“The day they pulled those planes up in Dallas,” says Fredi, “what a thrill. A few months later, I gave a talk in Dresden, and coming into the Frankfurt airport, there was one of those planes. I got tears in my eyes. That support means everything.”
The Promise Grant will enable her team at M. D. Anderson to continue studies that bring her into daily contact with the women whose lives
are at stake. One of those patients is Jenee Jongebloed Bobbora, who was diagnosed in 2003—a thirty-two-year-old woman with a two-year-old daughter.
“The survival rate at that time was about 5 percent,” says Dr. Robertson. “But seven years later, she’s NED—no evidence of disease—and life is good. She knows what it is to be a survivor; she sees what could have been, and she’s grateful for what is. She has this tremendous life force, and she’s so funny.”
Jenee was a teacher before, and now she’s on fire to educate women about the factors that contribute to misdiagnosis, which is a factor in the low survival rates for women with IBC. It’s rare, and those who get it are generally much younger than the average breast cancer patient. Instead of presenting with a lump in the breast, it often appears as a rash or redness. It’s often invisible on a mammogram or ultrasound. And it is hellishly aggressive. Early detection is key, but IBC is most often diagnosed at Stage IIIB, which is most often too late. Jenee helped establish the Inflammatory Breast Cancer Foundation, whose mission is to advance understanding of this rare but virulent cancer.
In 2006, M. D. Anderson opened the world’s first dedicated Inflammatory Breast Cancer Clinic. Fredi Robertson still suffers from searing chronic headaches, but there’s nowhere else she’d rather be.
“I’ve had friends who opted to retire early, but how could you possibly? I learn every day,” she says with obvious relish. “From advocates, from patients, from team members. M. D. Anderson is Disneyland for scientists. I feel really blessed to be here.”
We take a lot of flack (speaking of searing chronic headaches) from people who feel our corporate sponsors get more from the relationship than they ought to. I wish I could personally introduce each of those critics to Dr. Fredi Robertson.
People are fond of saying, “It’s not personal; it’s business.” But in my experience, those who achieve the greatest success in business take it very personally. They see a personal stake in the welfare of the customers from whom they derive their bottom line. At the end of the day, of course, they’re in business to make money. When we started down the road toward significant use of cause-related marketing, Norman cautioned
me never to lose sight of that fact, and I never have. Susan G. Komen for the Cure is a nonprofit organization; our corporate sponsors are not. Their raison d’être is profit. Every one of our corporate sponsors has a fiduciary duty to its stockholders, and stockholders are hoping for a pleasant retirement. We want them to thrive, because we need their help. We give and take, and if all goes as it should, we help each other muddle through to duel another day. That’s how money and love make the world go ’round.
In 2008, our corporate sponsors enabled us to invest an additional $55 million in discovering and delivering the cure for breast cancer. Whatever goodwill American Airlines realizes from its continued partnership with us—however many times that translates into someone buying a ticket from American instead of another provider—the airline deserves it. I value every yes I get. Our corporate partners do a lot of good for us, and I believe in the adage “what comes around, goes around.” I strive to be as tenacious and unflappable as my father, but he told me from the time I was young: “For every five yeses you get in life, you hear a hundred
no
s.”
Certainly, if the people critical of cause-related marketing were to offer to provide us with $55 million a year, we’d be happy to stay home and put our feet up. Till then, we’ll keep knocking on doors. In the early days of SGK, I pursued meetings with CEOs I admired, but I didn’t go to them with my hand out; I went to them asking for advice. Their wisdom was a great asset to us, and one of those benefactors was Bob Crandall of American Airlines. He gave me a lot of sound advice that stayed with me, but one particular point resonated with me.
“Don’t put all your eggs in one basket,” he cautioned. “When you see a source of revenue on the rise, it’s tempting to put all your energy there, but that’s a mistake.”
At the time, the Race for the Cure was really catching fire all over the country, and we were already seeing how it could go global. It was thrilling, but I was a little nervous about it taking over the organization. Without taking any energy away from that effort, I redoubled my outreach to corporate partners, and we’ve worked hard over the years to keep all the plates spinning.
When Eric was working with his teammates at JetBlue to design a new sort of customer experience, he said, “You have to go where you need to go. That’s the first thing. But getting there is more than just Point A to Point B.”
The same could be said for research. It’s a spiral staircase, not an elevator. The give-and-take goes around and comes around, peopled by scientists, physicians, patients, and supporters.
Mary Woodard Lasker has been called the “fairy godmother of medical research” for the way she facilitated symbiotic connections between the will and the way. Jonas Salk said, “She is a matchmaker between science and society.” When Suzy and I were growing up, Mary Lasker was a role model, and as I was beginning my career in business, I recognized the political savvy and social grace she wielded with the precision of a scalpel. She was responsible for the perennial daffodils visible from Lady Bird Johnson’s window at the White House—and for the congressional declaration of a national War on Cancer. The lesson wasn’t lost on me back then, but I only recently grasped its full meaning.
Not long ago, while visiting our affiliate in Orange County, California, I met Leslie Whitfield, who’s survived eighteen years since being diagnosed with Stage IV breast cancer.
“
Eighteen years?
” I gasped. “After the worst possible prognosis? That’s unheard of!”
“It hasn’t been easy,” she said, “but I’m alive, and I’m having a good life.”
“Tell me about your treatment. Walk me through it from the beginning.”
As she described her journey, every protocol, every chemo regimen, every blast of radiation, every setback and step forward, I was overwhelmed with emotion. Every therapy she’d received had been funded by SGK grant money. And now, against all odds, here she stood telling me about her family, working to raise money for research, reaching out to help other women with breast cancer.
I consider her an excellent investment.