Tommy lives on, 50 years after his death
By Katie Krauss
"Can I have some Jell-O? I want red."
Fifty years after her four-year-old son Tommy died, Marion Mozdzierz Yedynak vividly remembers the last words he spoke. Moments after the nurse left the room to procure some cherry Jell-O, Tommy had a seizure and went into a coma. He died two days later, on January 12, 1953, just two weeks before his fifth birthday.
"It's like it happened yesterday," said Marion. "I think that's how it is with any parent who has lost a child."
The clarity of Marion's reminiscences belies the number of years gone by. "Tommy was an adorable child. Everybody loved him," she said. Marion described her oldest daughter Joan, then 8, as very quiet and her six-year-old son Jimmy as loud, rambunctious and into everything. "But Tommy was a combination of the two of them. He was unusually friendly. We lived in a beautiful housing project called Sunvale in New Britain. He'd go knock on the neighbors' doors, talk to the women and make himself at home. He was everybody's pet."
She recalled, "One Saturday morning – I'll never forget the date: September 13 – Tommy and I were sitting on the back steps. The other children had gone off to the playground, and I said to him, 'Don't you want to go too?' And he said 'No.' He said he was tired and he looked pale.
"I called our doctor, who said, 'Bring him in.' so I brought him in and he took some blood. I remember he asked me if Tommy had been near any batteries. He thought he looked anemic."
Later that day, the doctor called Marion and told her to take Tommy to the hospital right away. At New Britain General Hospital, Tommy underwent several tests and a blood transfusion. A specialist named Dr. Roswell Johnson was called in.
"I'll never forget," said Marion. "Dr. Johnson called us to come into his office. He actually cried when he told us Tommy had leukemia and that there was nothing they could do."
With different medications, Tommy seemed to get better for awhile. But he was in and out of the hospital for blood tests and transfusions, and sometimes recurrent seizures.
One of Tommy's many friends was Burton Griffith, the mailman, who asked Tommy if he wanted to receive some get-well cards. When Tommy said yes, Griffith contacted the New Britain Herald who reported Tommy's dreams of getting lots of mail. News of the mail campaign spread and Tommy received over 5,000 letters and cards from all over the country. State media celebrities like WTNH-TV performers Pino and Fedora Bontempi, visited him, as did child singing start Jimmy Boyd, nationally known for his recent recording of "I saw Mommy kissing Santa Claus." Actress Margaret O'Brien sent him an autographed photo.
Tommy had a passion for firemen and fire trucks. His uncle, Ray Kelly, was a New Britain fireman. Members of the New Britain Fire Department visited, bringing a fire hat, a huge toy fire truck and a promise to ride on a real fire truck as soon as he got well.
Tommy never got that ride.
"I didn't think Tommy knew how sick he was, until on Christmas, we were in church and my son Jimmy was couldn't sit still or stop talking until Tommy turned to him and said, 'Shhh. We're asking God to help me get better.' That was the first time I knew he knew."
Tommy went back into the hospital right after Christmas and went downhill quickly.
"Tommy died at about 10 o'clock at night. My husband and I were both with him. I had been with him for two days straight. Two days and about 20 gallons of coffee. But he died.
"On our way home from the hospital that night, all the radio stations stopped the music they were playing and let people know Tommy had died. So even before we got in the house, my mother and father knew. They said it had come over the radio and television."
For the four months between his diagnosis of acute leukemia on September of 1952 and his death in January of 1953, Tommy had been a media darling and a household name to people throughout the state of Connecticut and beyond.
In December, New Britain's Fire Chief George W. Scarlett and fireman Joseph F. Kennedy, with other members of Hardware City Fire Fighters Local 992, started the Tommy Fund to help defray the costs of Tommy's medical bills. They presented the family with almost $1,000, and after the boy's death, the fund was renamed the Tommy Memorial Fund and went nationwide to raise money for leukemia research in Tommy's name. In December of 1953, they presented almost $8,000 to Yale University for statewide leukemia research.
The years went by. The media forgot about Tommy. Marion went on with her life. Three years after Tommy's death, she had another baby, a girl named Joyce. Tommy's older sister and brother, Joan and Jimmy, grew up, as did Joyce. Marion and Walter Mozdzierz got divorced in the 1960s. Marion married her second husband, Walter Yedynak, in 1973. Walter died four years ago. Marion has seven grandchildren and two great grandchildren.
Unbeknownst to Marion, in 1986, the Tommy Fund was about to be brought back to life at Yale-New Haven Hospital. "The Tommy Fund still existed on paper, and received occasional donations for pediatric oncology, but for the most part, it was dormant," said Dr. Peter Beardsley, a pediatric oncologist at YNHH. "No one knew where the name came from, but we had heard that the original fund had been started by firefighters."
With the goal of reviving the Tommy Fund to help increase awareness and raise funds for childhood cancer, Dr. Beardsley and Linda Boyers, the pediatric oncology social worker, approached other members of the staff and administration at the Hospital, as well as parents whose children had cancer. Two of those parents were David DeRosa of Fairfield and Tom Brunnock of Waterbury, whose daughters had both been diagnosed with cancer.
DeRosa's four-year-old daughter Francesca was undergoing treatment at Yale-New Haven. Much like Tommy, 34 years earlier, Francesca's first indication of a health problem had been listlessness and tiredness. Her pediatrician did blood work and called the DeRosas, saying, "We've got a really serious situation here. She needs to get to Yale."
Said DeRosa, "We went to New Haven and Dr. Peter Beardsley sat me and my wife Mary Lou down and told us Francesca had acute lymphoblastic leukemia. He said there was 'a 50/50 chance that she can beat this thing.' It was earth-shattering to us."
During the course of Francesca's treatment, Dr. Beardsley asked DeRosa about his interest in helping get the Tommy Fund off the ground and chair a fledgling board of directors. While neither the doctors, the parents, nor the staff knew much about the original Tommy Fund, they did know that the donation had come from firefighters. In keeping with that tradition, they invited New Haven firefighters to get involved. "I remember getting the phone call from Dr. Beardsley," said Marty O'Connor, now retired from the department and a professor at the University of New Haven. O'Connor and another firefighter, Pat Andrews, now a battalion chief, helped the Tommy Fund with its earliest fund-raising and awareness raising activities, including golf tournaments, charity softball games. Once Andrews even had a fire truck park on Howard Avenue in front of the Yale Physicians Building for some of the pediatric oncology patients to climb aboard.
DeRosa, who has owned and managed DeRosa's restaurant in Westport since 1980, also organized the first of 15 annual successful golf tournament fundraisers, beginning in 1986(87?). Said David, "I would always tell people at the Tommy Fund golf tournaments, 'What you give here today will be helping children and families who you might never meet and lives you might never know.'"
David also helped start the Tommy Fund holiday card program in 1987, in which pediatric oncology patients at the Yale-New Haven Children’s Hospital draw holiday cards, which are professionally printed and sold in the hospital and in the community.
Francesca DeRosa went on to "beat this thing" and graduated from Loyola University in May of 2003.
Tom Brunnock, who is the president of the Tommy Fund today, had very different experience. His daughter Shannon was eight when she diagnosed rhabdomyosarcoma, a muscle cancer, in 1985. Brunnock recalls the day she was transferred from her local hospital in Waterbury to Yale-New Haven Hospital.
"We found ourselves walking into the hospital, realizing our child has cancer," recalled Brunnock. "On Tuesday morning our lives were normal and on Wednesday everything had turned upside down."
Shannon was treated successfully for about two years, but the cancer recurred in 1987. When she died in November, she had just turned 11.
Shannon, had she lived, would have been 27 years old now. It is 16 years after his daughter's death, yet Tom Brunnock is still involved in the Tommy Fund.
"Yale-New Haven was so good to us," he said. "It's my way of giving back. When we were there, people made us feel at home," he explained. "And there are a lot of people out there whose kids have yet to be diagnosed. Chances are, wherever they live in Connecticut, they're going to be treated at Yale-New Haven Children's Hospital. So we will be reaching kids and parents who don't even know they are going to need help yet.
Since the beginning, Brunnock, Like DeRosa, has been key to the growth and maturation of the organization, which now raises $250,000 a year.
"Our mission is simple: to provide emotional, medical and recreational support to children with cancer and their families, and to improve the cure rate of childhood cancer through Yale-New Haven Children’s Hospital and the Yale University School of Medicine," said Brunnock. Money from the Tommy Fund has supported both a pediatric social worker at the hospital and a physician fellowship in pediatric oncology at the Yale School of Medicine. In other ways, large and small, the Tommy Fund has been able to make a real difference in the lives of families at Yale-New Haven Children’s Hospital. The Tommy Fund has paid for the construction of the adolescent day room in the Children’s Hospital, and the creation of a “Quiet Room” in the Pediatric Specialty Center where parents can talk to other parents or just be quiet. It has enabled donations of toys, video and audiotapes, games, books and arts and crafts supplies for the kids.
The organization has established support groups for patients, parents and siblings and created the “Making Clinic Bearable” campaign that awards a teddy bear each month to a child undergoing outpatient treatment. They also developed the “Kids Helping Kids Fight Cancer” program in which area schools help raise money to purchase toys and hats for pediatric cancer patients.
"The great thing about Yale-New Haven is that it pays attention to the whole range of needs – medical, surgical, social work to help the parents, and child life to help the kids," said Brunnock. "And so the money the Tommy Fund raises also reaches that whole range of needs – from treatment, to research, to simply helping families pay for parking or cope with their daily lives.
Over the years, people at the Yale-New Haven Children's Hospital continued to wonder about Tommy. Who was he? Did he still have family in the area? Dr. Beardsley asked Dr. Howard Pearson, then chief of pediatrics at Yale-New Haven, what he knew about Tommy or the Tommy Fund. Dr. Pearson didn't know any more than a vague connection with firemen, but suggested he talk with a former chief of hematology, Dr. David Clement. But Dr. Clement, too, had no information.
"But several weeks later," said Dr. Beardsley, "I got a message on my machine from Dr. Clement, who said, 'Give me call. I have may have some information for you about the Tommy Fund.'"
But Dr. Clement died that night, so Peter Beardsley never got the news.
Then, late in 2000, the Tommy Fund board of directors had an Internet search conducted and sent out letters to every Mozdzierz they could find to see if any were related to Tommy. There was no response.
Marion, of course had remarried and was no longer named Mozdzierz. She had had no contact with her ex-husband for over 30 years. But last year, Walter Mozdzierz, Tommy's father, died. When Jimmy sorted through his father's personal belongings, he came across the letter the Tommy Fund had sent. First Jimmy called his mother. Then he called the Tommy Fund and told him that Tommy's mother was still alive, well and living in Connecticut.
Marion was shocked when she heard from the Tommy Fund. She was amazed to learn that the group raised about $250,000 for children with cancer each year and that more than $3 million dollars has been raised in Tommy's name. She has subsequently visited the Children's Hospital and seen some of its legacy first hand.
"If I had only known," she said recently. "After Tommy died, the publicity and fundraising died down right away. For the longest time I felt like I kept waiting for somebody to come. Someone I could talk to. And there was nobody to talk to."
"Maybe this is what I was waiting for."
In memoriam, Thomas Douglas Mozdzierz
February 4, 1948 - January 12, 1953