Marlo Thomas on the mission of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital
On a special Thanksgiving Day edition of the “Daily Variety” podcast, Marlo Thomas, the actor, author and activist, revisits the remarkable story of how her father, entertainer Danny Thomas, launched St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. And we’ll take a Vintage Variety look back at how St. Jude’s origin story played out in our pages.
St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital opened in 1962, after Danny Thomas spent more than a decade storming the country organizing fundraisers. He also leaned on his Hollywood friends to draw attention and money to his cause. St. Jude serves children dealing with childhood cancer and other life-threatening illnesses. The ethos of the organization is that no family is turned away due to their inability to pay. St. Jude provides an incredible level of free services to families overwhelmed by the hardships of coping with a serious illness.
Marlo Thomas and her brother, producer Tony Thomas, and sister Terre Thomas, have been an integral part of the St. Jude story since childhood. Today, St. Jude is a world-renowned institution and the three siblings and their families remain active in fundraising campaigns for the institution to which their father dedicated much of his life.
Currently, Thomas’ siblings are in the middle of St. Jude’s annual Thanks and Giving holiday promotion.
“My sister, brother and I created this 22 years ago. We’ve raised $1 billion so far through this program, which we’re very excited about, and we’ve now increased it to $100 million dollars annually,” Thomas said. “No one pays at Saint Jude. No one pays for anything. They don’t pay for treatment, travel, housing or food. We pay for all that. And it is our honor and privilege to do that.”
Danny Thomas’ extraordinary dedication to St. Jude was rooted in his upbringing, growing up in the 1910s and ’20s in an immigrant neighborhood in Toledo, Ohio, his daughter explained.
“His parents were from Lebanon. He was a first-generation American. And little kids in his neighborhood were dying of things like appendicitis and the flu. Those are diseases that should be curable. But because their parents couldn’t afford a doctor, they didn’t go to a doctor. And so they didn’t make it. And that made a deep impression on my father,” Thomas remembers. “That’s why he thought that if he was ever successful, he would build a hospital for children of all religions and all races, and no one would have to pay and they would all get the same first-class care. And that’s something that my family and all of us at Saint Jude have taken very seriously.”
Below is a great feature “Sully’s Scrapbook” that appeared in the February 28, 1962 edition of Variety which chronicles Danny Thomas’ long road to the opening of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital on February 4, 1962. The column also highlights Thomas’ work in front of and behind the camera, as producer of “The Andy Griffith Show” and many other series.
From the February 28, 1962 edition of Variety
Listen to Daily Variation on iHeartPodcasts, Apple podcastsVariations YouTube podcast channel, Amazon Music, Spotify and other podcast platforms.
