September 1, 2026 • 46 mins
It is to the great nation of Canada’s lasting credit that it has prized Terry Fox as one of the most beloved and admired citizens for nearly 50 years now. It’s difficult to get across how much he means to Canada. Lucky for us, his story speaks for itself.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. This is Josh, and
there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, And we are gonna
go back to Canada because we had such a nice
time there in June and July that Yeah, we're gonna
do it all Canadian episode.
Speaker 3 (00:27):
Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
We did six shows across Canada. It was our pleasure
to be there as their guests. Yes, and all across Canada.
I feel like during Q and A, people would ask
us why we haven't or would we and maybe why
we haven't. That's like the rudest a Canadian could ever get.
It's like very sheepishly to say, why haven't you guys
(00:49):
covered Terry Fox yet?
Speaker 2 (00:51):
Yes, it's specifically. There are two people worth calling out.
The first is William the First. He was the birthday
boy at our Montreal show. We called them William the
First because there were a few other Williams who asked
questions asked after him. But I saw he and his
mom he asked us to do Terry Fox. And then
the next day I ran into him and his mom
at the train station and they elaborated further on how
(01:14):
great Terry Fox would be for an idea for an episode.
And then the other guy, Chris, who met us at
the airport in Winnipeg, they also suggested it too, So
Canada you can thank William the first and Chris.
Speaker 3 (01:27):
That's right. Before we get started.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
We do want to mention though, that we are going
on a cruise, a stuff cruise.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
Right, yes, stuff at sea and Chuck, it's not even
a cruise, buddy, it's so high falutin.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
It's a voyage, that's right. It is a voyage. And
we are departing from New York City from Brooklyn actually
on October second, sailing to Bermuda and then back to
New York. We have since learned that our live show
will be on day two, yes, of the voyage, at
four pm, and we're still getting confirmation on exactly how
(02:08):
you sign up for that specific thing, but just you know,
a lot of people have signed up. The boat is
filling up, and if you want to come out and
go on a sea voyage with us and our other
stuff colleagues, there's lots of fun, fun stuff, planned stuff,
stuff stuff.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
Yeah, we're just gonna be hanging out on the boat
with everybody too, so it will be a good time.
And that show, like you said, it's early in the afternoon,
so our hope is that you can all be in
bed by six point thirty.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
That's right. We don't want to mess up anyone's dinner plans,
you know. Yep.
Speaker 2 (02:38):
So yeah, you just search stuff at sea on Virgin
voyages and you will find everything you need. And uh yeah,
so we'll see you guys in October coming up, Chuck,
that's like a month or so.
Speaker 3 (02:50):
I know, it's really snuck up on me.
Speaker 2 (02:52):
Same here, it pounds too.
Speaker 3 (02:54):
That's right. And now not to Terry Fox.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
Yeah, so I think a lot of I should say,
a lot of the world can be forgiven for not
having heard of Terry Fox. I actually feel kind of
like a shmo for having never ever heard of him
or what he did. Oh really, yeah, had you when
we were touring Canada?
Speaker 3 (03:14):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (03:14):
And you know, I uh not, because I'm just you know,
some sabant that knew about all of Canadian history as
a child. Sure, but I was a youngster who had
HBO and I watched the Terry Fox movie, the nineteen
eighty three movie with Robert Duvall, like more than three
or four times.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
Robert Duval seems old to play Terry Fox, right.
Speaker 3 (03:39):
He didn't play Terry Fox. But yeah, I saw that.
I saw that movie.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
You know, it was on HBO, And I saw every
HBO movie at least three or four times when I
was at age.
Speaker 3 (03:48):
H So that's how I know about the Terry Fox story.
It was from that.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
Film, Okay. Yeah, And that was definitely like when he
was part of like the immediate zeitgeist, Like he was
world famous. And what stands out to me too is
he was world famous for what he did over the
course of about a year, like he became like a
public figure and then basically what he did to put
(04:15):
himself on the map as a public figure and do
this amazing thing. I'm just teasing here. I'm not even
gonna say what he did yet it was basically over
the course of a year.
Speaker 3 (04:25):
Chuck, that's right, Uh, maybe we should say what he did.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
I agree, Okay.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
Terry Fox was a very brave, inspiring person, like like
you said, not only in Canada but throughout the world.
Because he had cancer. He lost a leg to cancer
and planned the Marathon of Hope where he was to
run clear across Canada with a prosthetic leg. And that's
probably all shit we should reveal for now.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
Yeah, yeah, let's let's go back to the beginning. We're
going to go back to Winnipeg where we were. That
was our last show in Canada. That was great. And
on July twentieth, nineteen fifty eight, if you had gone
to one of the fine hospitals in Winnipeg and asked around,
you might have found Raleigh and Betty Fox were having
a baby named Terry. Terry I think he was Terrence
(05:15):
Stanley Fox is what he was born. And very quickly
Terry said, this is it's way too cold in Winnipeg.
Let's move out to the Pacific coast where it's mild.
And Betty and Rawley said, let's do that. So the
family of six went out to I guess a suburb
of Vancouver, Port Coquitlam.
Speaker 3 (05:37):
Did you are you sure it wasn't a home birth?
Speaker 2 (05:39):
By the way, my goodness, that didn't even occur to me.
I mean, that would make it way harder to find
Betty and Rawleigh if you had to go house to house.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
I get to see that being like the first correction.
It's like, guys, they weren't in the hospital.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
Absolutely no. Like basically, if I have any chance of
getting it wrong, I'm going to get it wrong.
Speaker 1 (05:57):
So when Terry was a kid, he was really into
sports and really was his entire life. But he wasn't
you know, he wasn't blessed with the like the size
of an athlete. He wasn't a natural athlete. But he
was very determined, as we'll see, even as a kid.
So you know, there are plenty of stories from his
childhood where you know, he would go out for baseball
(06:18):
practice like an hour early, waiting at the corner for
his ride, or when he took up basketball.
Speaker 3 (06:25):
You know, he was not a big guy.
Speaker 1 (06:27):
He was one of the shortest and smallest kids in
his class in the eighth grade, so he would show
up early for practice. He would be the last one
to leave practice. And as the story goes on the
eighth grade team, he played one minute of actual basketball
on the court like during the season, and by tenth
grade he was the starting guard and by twelfth grade,
(06:48):
his senior year, he was voted co athlete of the
Year at his high school with his best friend Doug Allward.
Speaker 3 (06:55):
Is that cool, that's amazing.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
I mean. So that's just one of numerous stories about
how cool this kid was and how hard he tried
it everything and not just basketball. He also played soccer,
he played rugby, He ran cross country, and he got
into cross country when his basketball coach, when he was
playing very little at the time and still trying to
(07:17):
practice and get good, his basketball coach was like, maybe
give up basketball and go take up cross country, and
so Terry was like, I'll just do both.
Speaker 1 (07:26):
Yeah, And he said does that mean a run across Canada?
And they said no, that's just what you call the
sport when you're running through the woods and not on
a track.
Speaker 2 (07:33):
And he goes, yeah, run across Canada exactly.
Speaker 1 (07:37):
It hatched an idea after high school in his athletic
career there. He went to Simon Fraser University. He played
on the JV basketball team in college.
Speaker 3 (07:47):
Yeah, and was in a car wreck that fall. Didn't
get like super hurt.
Speaker 1 (07:53):
He was a little banged up, but he started getting
some knee pain and for about six months or so
he just kind of chalk that up to fall out
from that car wreck. Sure, and then that next spring
he was like, I should probably go to a doctor.
This is March of seventy seven, and when he was
at the doctor, you know, he heard those terrible words
(08:14):
that you hear in an appointment like that, which is, hey,
you have cancer.
Speaker 2 (08:20):
Yeah, specifically an osteogenic sarcoma, which is bone cancer that
starts in the knee. And this was a time where
cancer research and cancer treatment was the best thing you
could do for something like that was to amputate. Yeah,
you have to get not just the tumor out, but
all the cancer that's around it. And so they're like,
(08:42):
we just need to take off I think that six
inches above his knee. And he's eighteen at the time,
an athletic kid like this is for most people, most
eighteen year old boys who were like into sports, this
would just be life shattering, and I'm sure it was.
But he had an ability to kind of pick himself
up and be like, Okay, this is my new reality.
(09:04):
Let's see how I can excel in this reality too.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
Yeah, And I even remember that, and I kind of
scrubbed through some of the Robert de Bald movie. They
handle all that in about twenty.
Speaker 3 (09:16):
Seconds in the film.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
Really yeah, I mean, you know, it was an early eighties,
I guess it was a TV movie, but I saw
it on HBO.
Speaker 3 (09:24):
Maybe it was an HBO movie. I don't know.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
Hey, I believe that you saw it on HBO. You've
been so emphatic about it that even if it was
a TV movie, Even if the president of HBO at
the time came to me and said it wasn't on HBO,
I wouldn't believe him.
Speaker 1 (09:38):
It had to be, because why else would I have
seen it multiple times? Those TV movies just ran like
a movie of the week, and they were gone forever.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
Do you remember the one it was an after school special?
It wasn't a TV movie of the week, but it
featured Helen Hunt and she smokes PCP and runs and
jumps out of a second story window in her high
school because she's flipped out on PCP and it was
Helen that.
Speaker 3 (10:00):
Was on HBO. The Home Box Office, Sure, man, we
should get them as a sponsor. What a plug?
Speaker 2 (10:09):
Did you ever see? There's a video of the HBO,
the original HBO like I guess title card or whatever,
where Like it zooms through the street to this neighborhood
and all the lights are starting to come on, and
then it gets to the mountains and it says HBO
or whatever. That was an actual model. I saw people
(10:29):
filming in it and going through with this camera. It
was really amazing. There's a like a short video of it.
Speaker 3 (10:35):
It's great.
Speaker 1 (10:41):
Oh man, If we're not getting HBO money by the
end of this episode, I'm to be really upset.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
I also want to say to our new listeners who
are Canadian and haven't listened to us before but saw
Terry Fox episode and started to listen. This is pretty
much par for the course for every episode we've ever done,
and we're coming up on eighteen hundred of them.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
That's right, eighteen hundred times we've gotten sidetracked, probably times
three at least.
Speaker 3 (11:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
All right, So back to Terry Fox. He has gotten
this terrible diagnosis. He decides, you know, despite his amputation,
he's going to move forward as an athlete.
Speaker 3 (11:19):
He undergoes sixteen months of chemo.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
And that same summer that he like right after he
had this amputation, he goes out and is like, I'm
going to join a wheelchair basketball team. And not only that,
he joins the Vancouver Cable Cars in nineteen seventy seven
in a tournament and leads this team to back to
back national tournaments in seventy eight and seventy nine, Like
(11:44):
right out of the gate, man, he's after.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
It, right, So I mean by that time, he's what
nineteen maybe twenty for the second one. Have you ever
seen a wheelchair basketball game?
Speaker 1 (11:54):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (11:55):
Yeah, they're amazing.
Speaker 3 (11:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
There was a team called that I looked up the
name because I couldn't remember, but the Toledo Silver Streaks,
And I'm not sure how my mom got into it,
but we used to go to Silver Streaks games a lot. Yeah.
Oh that's early eighties. It was very cool.
Speaker 3 (12:09):
I never saw one live. I bet that's a Oh.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
Yeah, you saw him on TV? Was this on HBO?
Speaker 3 (12:15):
Just stop shame on you.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
Around this time, he meets a young woman named Rika
Noda and she became She became a very prominent figure
in his life, obviously as his girlfriend and someone who
would you know, would be by his side through this
whole next chapter that we're about to talk about.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
Yeah, and one other thing about him, So he when
he took to his wheelchair for wheelchair basketball, he already
had an artificial leg, a prosthetic, but he would train
in his wheelchair going up like mountain passes.
Speaker 3 (12:48):
Yeah, like he he.
Speaker 2 (12:51):
It wasn't just like level roadways. It wasn't just like
going to the gym. Like he would figure out like
the hardest thing you could do to train, and then
that's what he would go do.
Speaker 3 (12:59):
Yeah, pretty smart.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
Like I bet when he got on the basketball court
he's like, this is a piece of cake compared to
going up a mountain exactly.
Speaker 2 (13:06):
Yeah, do you want to take a break now, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:09):
Let's take a break and we'll be right back with
more on the Great Terry Fox.
Speaker 2 (13:33):
Okay, Chuck, so dialing it back a minute. The night
before Terry's leg was amputated, it was his right leg,
and again it was about six inches above his knee
was where they amputated. And the night before, his high
school basketball coach, a guy named Terry Fleming, brought Terry
Fox an article about a guy named Dick Traum who
(13:55):
was the first amputee to run the New York City Marathon.
From what I could tell, he may have been the
first amputee who ran any kind of marathon. And he
became after a car accident took his leg. He became
an activist for accessibility, and so it was a pretty
inspiring article. You know, and it just got right through
(14:20):
to Terry Fox, like it was about the perfect thing
that his high school coach could have done for him.
Speaker 1 (14:26):
Yeah, for sure, because he hears his story, and I
mean almost immediately afterward, it's like, I know what I'm
going to do, Like I know what my immediate life
purpose is. I'm going to run across Canada and I'm
going to raise money for cancer research.
Speaker 2 (14:40):
Yeah. And he also was kind of driven to raise
money for cancer research because one of his doctors had
told him that if he'd been diagnosed just a few
years earlier, he would have gotten way way worse treatment,
like it was just advancing and just a couple of
years ago his survival, his chance of survival would have
(15:02):
been way less. So he was like, Okay, actually doing
cancer research is definitely worthwhile too, right.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
Like they're making gains and can make even more with
more money and more research.
Speaker 2 (15:13):
Exactly, you always say it better than me.
Speaker 3 (15:16):
That's not true. So he keeps this.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
He didn't make some huge announcement at first. He told Rika,
his girlfriend, He told his best friend Doug, and they
start kind of training in private again, just sort of
keeping it quiet at his local junior high and the first.
You know, prosthetics have come a really really long way
since since Terry Fox's prosthetic leg.
Speaker 3 (15:42):
Yeah, I guess we could talk a little bit about that.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
So the guy who designed his leg, his name was
Ben I guess Spiker was how i'd pronounce it. It was,
you know, pretty new and like the development of artificial
limbs that you could actually like use for running and
you know, to be athletic on. It was a sort
of a radical idea at the time, I guess, yeah,
(16:07):
And so they settled on something pretty simple. They didn't
want to get like too wacky with it. They just
you know, were like, this needs to be suctioned onto
your remaining leg and there's no shock absorption. It's going
to be straight like this is, you know, pre when
they had things obviously like these days when you have
(16:29):
stuff like Oscar Oscar Pistorius and those like blades that
he runs on, they're like a pound each. This thing
weighed nine pounds and was just straight. So it really
modified the way Terry had to use it and had
to run.
Speaker 2 (16:44):
Yeah, because he did. He lacked the muscles like he
had hamstrings, but they didn't reach down to his knee.
Or his calf, same with his quadricepts, so he ended
up having to do all of the work of running
with his right hip muscles. And again there was also
no shock absorption, and Ben Spiker was really trying. They
worked on a lot of different models. One of them, yeah,
(17:06):
was like a pogo stick. Basically it was based on
a pogo stick. And like you said, they finally ended
up on a simple version. And the simple version actually
proved to be pretty smart because when he started his
marathon of Hope, it needed to be repaired a couple
of times along the way.
Speaker 1 (17:24):
Yeah, I mean, I think there was this one story
where a guy at an auto body shop repaired it
with like.
Speaker 2 (17:29):
Car parts seventy eight Malibu.
Speaker 3 (17:31):
Parts, hey styling.
Speaker 2 (17:34):
Yeah, and then there was a welder I think in
Salt Saint Marie who fixed who repaired it at one
point too. So the fact that it was simple helped
him in the long run, even though it was excruciating
to run on like he very frequently, I think basically
the entire time every day he had blood like coming
(17:55):
down where his prosthetic met his leg.
Speaker 1 (17:58):
Yeah, for sure. The artificial foot was made from rubber
and wood. They I mean, they did the best they
could with absorbing impact, but it was not great. So
he had to adapt, like I said earlier, his running
style into what they called a hop and skip running
style where he hopped on his left leg and then
would swing that prosthetic leg forward and then skip back
(18:21):
again to his left leg. So, if you've ever obviously
seen the great HBO movie, I think there was one
in the early two thousands as well, they did another movie.
I haven't seen that one, or just seen a clip
of the real Terry Fox. Right, you know it's it
can only be best described as like an awkward running
style that you just had to grit your way through.
Speaker 2 (18:45):
Yes, that's exactly right. And if you also, Chuck are interested,
I believe three iterations of his artificial leg, starting with
the first and then going to the one he ran on.
They are at the Royal British Columbia Museum, I think,
on display. Yeah, there's a bunch of stuff about him
(19:05):
on display there now, all.
Speaker 1 (19:07):
Right, So they eventually land on a version again that
these days it seems very archaic, but back then it
did the job. Still a lot of discomfort, but he
could start to run longer and longer, and he started
training more and he finally entered his first race in
August of seventy nine. This is just six months after
he started training, and he was like, I'm just gonna
(19:29):
get out there and run, like try and get halfway
through it, just to see what I can do. But
he ended up running seventeen miles finish the race.
Speaker 2 (19:38):
Yeah, and actually he finished last, but he was just
ten minutes behind the last two legged runners. So he
also got his first taste of being cheered on by
a bunch of strangers who were moved by his determination
essentially to become a key theme in the life of
Terry Fox. So he was like, okay, I can totally
do this. I think when he started he covered like
(20:02):
five thousand kilometers I think during his training period. And
this is not over a terribly long time, I think
you said. He entered his first race in August of
nineteen seventy nine. He started the Marathon of Hope in
April April of eighty right, So okay, so within a
year he'd already covered five thousand kilometers in a prosthetic leg.
(20:24):
So he's like, I can totally do this, And he
told his parents his mom later said I told them
something along the lines of I think you're crazy for
trying this, But I read that his dad was like,
when are you going to start? It was just the
way I think people approached Terry, Like he was known
to be very stubborn and determined. Yeah, obviously, but he
(20:45):
was like, you know, the point here is not for
me to show off. It's to raise money for cancer
research in Canada. And like he figured out that doing
this was going to attract a lot of attention and
he could use that attention to say, hey, thanks for
the support, donate to cancer research. He needed the help
(21:07):
of the actual like Canadian Cancer Society, And at first
when he approached them, they were like, that's a good idea, kid,
but we're not really convinced it's going to do anything.
Speaker 3 (21:18):
Yeah. I mean, you know, he was trying to raise
a million bucks. That was his goal. Obviously.
Speaker 1 (21:23):
The Canadian Cancer Society, like any organization like that, gets
a lot of queries and sponsorship requests from people. Sure,
so to them, I think this was just another one
of those. And they said he was pretty dogged though,
and they said, all right, listen, kid, if you can
get some other people on board as sponsors, then we'll talk.
(21:44):
So he and his mom wrote to a bunch of
corporations and it was pretty amazing.
Speaker 3 (21:50):
They got a lot of support right out of the gate.
Speaker 1 (21:53):
The Ford Motor Company donated a camper van because they
needed a van to ride along on this whole run.
Speaker 2 (21:59):
Yes, they also donated the grass gas or ass sticker
that it came with.
Speaker 3 (22:04):
That's right. I've onally bought one of these.
Speaker 1 (22:07):
I think I told you that, No you didn't, Yeah,
a couple of years ago. It's my favorite bumper sticker
of all times. Yeah, that's hot one. And I put
it on the I have stickers on the big, huge
heavy trash can at my camp.
Speaker 2 (22:21):
Oh cool, Yeah I did.
Speaker 3 (22:22):
I couldn't. I didn't put it on my car.
Speaker 2 (22:24):
It's gonna say, this is a twist I had not expected.
Speaker 3 (22:28):
Yeah, yeah, hits at the camp.
Speaker 1 (22:30):
So they donate the camper van, Adidas donates twenty four
pairs of their running shoes. Yeah, Imperial Oil and safe
Way donated food and gas money, and then Pacific Western
Airline said all right, we'll fly everyone out to Newfoundland.
Where are you going to start this thing? And you know, godspeed?
So he had those sponsors. Secured went back to the
(22:52):
Canadian Cancer Society and they were like, all right, kid,
you know, he went out and did what we asked
you to do, so we're gonna get behind you in
the Marathon of Hope forty six hundred mile how many
kilometers is.
Speaker 2 (23:05):
At something like seventy four hundred kilometers I.
Speaker 1 (23:08):
Think, all right, starting out in Saint John's, Newfoundland, all
the way to Vancouver, his home, and they were going
to begin, like I said, April nineteen eighty. So, you know,
we talked about the physical training that happened. There was
also the mental game because obviously to undertake something like this,
it requires you know, the head, the heart, the physicality
(23:29):
to do it all. And so he realized early on, like,
I can't think of this as a seventy four hundred
kilometer run. I need to think of it as like
one day at a time, and then within that day
to break it down, like maybe I can run the
next mile, and then once I've finished that mile, I
(23:50):
can get another mile. And apparently on days that were
really really tough on him, he'd say, I just need
to run to that next stop sign or to that
next corner. He would count telephone polls and do math
problems in his head to distract from just the literal
physical pain that he was going through.
Speaker 2 (24:07):
Yeah, which is probably the most difficult thing you can
do as a runner. A long distance runner math so
much so. I remember, probably ten years ago, there was
an article that profiled the woman who had I believe
it's retrograde amnesia, where you like just reset like every
couple of minutes or every few seconds, depending on how
your amnesia is. Yeah, and she was she was protested
(24:34):
by other runners, like professional runners, as having an unfair advantage.
Speaker 3 (24:38):
Oh interesting, because they're.
Speaker 2 (24:39):
Like that whole like h the as Iron Maiden put it,
the loneliness of a long distance runner never built up
for her. So they were like, that's not fair. But
that just goes to show you how awful that the
mental part of running is so much more than the
physical part. That they were like, this is this is
not fair.
Speaker 3 (24:58):
And I guess awful competitive li long distance runners are right,
like what are you kidding me?
Speaker 2 (25:04):
Yeah, they're like, have you never heard of dick troum
and accessibility?
Speaker 3 (25:08):
Wow, that's that's nuts. I can't believe they did that.
It's not fair. She can't remember how awful it's been
for that past hour.
Speaker 2 (25:16):
That's pretty much the message. Sure, wow, all right.
Speaker 3 (25:19):
Obviously I'm kidding about long distance runners. They're great people.
Speaker 1 (25:21):
Sure, So he was getting dizzy spells, he would get
double vision. He figured, like, it's just exhaustion. Obviously, he
had to get a certificate of health from a cardiologist
from the Canadian Cancer Society to even undertake this. And
when he did this, a doctor diagnosed him with an
(25:42):
enlarge heart, which is not the most uncommon thing for
like an athlete like this. But the doctor was like, hey, listen,
if you get out there and you're short of breath
and you're dizzy, like you've got to stop running. And
he just kept terry, kept quiet about the fact that like, yeah, buddy,
that's already happy and I'm pushing through.
Speaker 2 (26:01):
Right, he said to himself quietly, nuts to that exactly.
So he's gonna start running across the entirety of Canada
with an enlarged heart on a prosthetic leg in nineteen
eighty and I feel like that's a great place for
a break. And when we come back, we're going to
kick off the Marathon of Hope. Chuck.
Speaker 3 (26:22):
All right, we'll be right back. All right, here we are.
Speaker 1 (26:44):
It's April twelfth, nineteen eighty. I have just turned nine
years old. I don't know about Terry Fox yet because
the movie hasn't been made.
Speaker 2 (26:53):
I'm coming up on four.
Speaker 3 (26:55):
See that's why you didn't know. You didn't know about
Robert Daball and HBO when you were four.
Speaker 2 (26:58):
Oh, I knew all about Robert Duvall.
Speaker 1 (27:03):
Big a pocketlyps now fantoms for sure. So Terry Fox
begins his Marathon of hope. He started off by dipping
his prosthetic leg into the Atlantic Ocean on the coast
of Newfoundland, and his goal was, all right, this will
be easy. I'll just go out and run about a
marathon a day until I reach Vancouver, and maybe I
(27:28):
can raise a million dollars by doing this. So lofty goals,
you know, to raise a million bucks. It sounds kind
of quaint now, but that you know, it's a lot
of money back then. I mean it's a lot of
money now obviously, but if you're trying to like raise
money for cancer research today, somebody would obviously shoot way higher.
But that was a ton of money back then to raise,
and he it was quite at the beginning, because you know,
(27:52):
no one knew about Terry Fox at the time. So
he starts out running and there's like, you know, a
couple of photographers there from the local paper and like
six or eight people maybe clapping for him, and that's
how it all started.
Speaker 2 (28:05):
It did, and he got frustrated really quickly because he
had the full support and an encouragement of the Canadian
Cancer Society, but that didn't translate into actual action on
their part. Like for this thing to actually work, people
had to know in towns ahead of right schedule, Yeah,
so that you had volunteers who were coordinating stuff like
(28:28):
getting the word out to the press, like you needed
ccs like spokespeople talking to local newspapers and TV stations,
like you had to let people know so that they
could show up and see him, be moved by what
he was doing and then donate. Like that's just how
it had to go, or else he was just doing
this for almost nothing, and that's how it went for
(28:49):
like the first month. He would get very frustrated. When
he'd run through a town, sometimes rather large town, they'd
be like, who are you. We haven't heard anything about this,
And I think in the first month. The whole month,
all he'd raised was twenty five thousand dollars. And so
because of this, like he was getting frustrated, not just
(29:09):
with the cancer Society, but just frustrated in general. I mean, like,
I can't imagine how tired I would be after one
marathon rather than a month of daily marathons essentially, And
his friend Doug Alward had joined him to drive the
van basically slowly with him, and they were living together
in the van. So things were getting a touch tense
(29:33):
very early on.
Speaker 1 (29:34):
Yeah, for sure, I definitely remember this from the movie
that they were They argued a lot and they thought it,
why is that so funny?
Speaker 2 (29:42):
I just I don't know. I just imagined Robert Duval
driving the van and turn around saying, pipe down back there.
Speaker 1 (29:49):
No, no, he comes along later, Okay. So yeah, they
were at each other's throats a lot. You know, Terry was,
like you said, a stubborn guy. Apparently he had a
bit of a temper, and would you know, he and
Doug would get in fights. It was a lot to undertake,
Like the pressure of this guy was under to bite
off something this big and put himself out there like that. Obviously,
(30:10):
there was a lot of stress involved, so Terry's brother
Daryl joins them in New Brunswick to just sort of
add like a third piece to that to help defuse
the tension. I guess a little bit. You mentioned that,
you know, he wasn't getting a lot of attention at first,
apparently in Quebec. And this was, by the way, not
our experience there. We loved Montreal and we found the
(30:32):
people there to be wonderful. But apparently he didn't get
any publicity coming into town, didn't raise any money at
all in Quebec when he was running through and like
angered a lot of drivers on the road. Apparently they
tried to run him off the road. People were honking
at him. He tried running on the highway because it
had like a shoulder to run on, but the police
(30:54):
there like kicked him off the highway. So he didn't
get a warm reception in Quebec at first, right.
Speaker 2 (31:00):
And also didn't raise very much money throughout the whole province.
And I have to say again I agree with you,
the people of Montreal were amazing. I had two quebec
Qua taxi drivers, one in Vancouver, one in Toronto, and
both of them drove like total maniacs. I have to
(31:21):
at least say that they were great guys talking to him,
having fun, but they were maniacs. As one of them
actually turned around at one point where he's shooting down
at right turn only lane to cut in in front
of a bunch of traffic going quite fast, and he
turns around and he's like, how do you like my driving?
Speaker 3 (31:38):
Wow?
Speaker 1 (31:38):
All right, so maybe this tracks with his experience with
the drivers there. Terry Fox's yes, okay, all right. So
had it not been for the Toronto Star newspaper and
a reporter named Leslie Scribner, Terry Fox may not have
garnered such widespread acclaim because she was drawn to Terry's
story and hats off to the Toronto Star because they
(32:01):
really really got behind him such that they assigned her
to write a weekly column called Running with Terry, where
she went on the road with them, basically like reporting
on everything that's going on. And by the time they
get to Toronto, all of a sudden, he's running from
you know, Quebec. His spirits are down, no one really
(32:23):
even knows what he's doing, and he comes into Toronto
like almost like a national hero overnight.
Speaker 2 (32:29):
Yeah, pretty much. I read an article, I think from
the Toronto Star where they quoted they said a grandmother
age attendee. Her name was Edith Cathy. She gave a
quote to the paper where she said that she thought
she was in love for the first time. It's been
a long time since anyone has given me feelings, real feelings.
(32:51):
He just seemed to fill your life with something that
was missing. And like, that's kind of how he was
starting to inspire people. He was making people like feel
and it very quickly became the whole country and then
eventually spilled out of the borders of Canada into the world.
While he was doing this, he finally did what he
(33:13):
had set out to do. Like he had finally gotten
to the hearts of Canada and Canadians, and now it
was time for them to be like, we want to
support you. Here's some money for cancer research.
Speaker 3 (33:25):
Yeah for sure.
Speaker 1 (33:25):
And you know, he was a young, handsome guy and
so that certainly didn't hurt to capture the hearts of Canadians.
Speaker 2 (33:32):
And he had a cool name, yeah.
Speaker 3 (33:34):
Terry Fox. Great name.
Speaker 2 (33:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (33:36):
When he got to Toronto, they asked him to do
the kickoff of a football game there. Apparently when he
came on to the field. As the story goes, the
stadium announcer says, ladies and gentlemen, and like the rest
of it is drowned out because people are just going crazy.
He met Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, he met Bobby Orr,
the great hockey player, and Darryl Settler, another great hockey player,
(33:59):
apparently his idol. They gave him an NHL All Star jersey.
So money starts coming in, celebrity starts happening, and he
realized that, like, you know, this is exactly what he
wanted to help raise awareness and money, but it took
a toll on him, and that now every time he
goes to everyone wants to do an interview with him,
(34:19):
and everyone wants him to come to an inspirational speaking engagement.
So you know, he's running the equivalent of like close
to a marathon a day, so he's physically wrecked. He
has tendonitis in his ankle, he has a dry cough
that wouldn't go away, and he is all of a
sudden like has to deal like constantly with being interviewed
(34:41):
as a national hero, which was awesome but like really depleting.
Speaker 2 (34:45):
Not only that, like there were plenty of towns that
wanted to help him with fundraising events. But we need
you to come give a speech so the Chamber of
Commerce can have their picture taken with you for the
local paper, like that kind of stuff. Not just we're
going to support, we want something from you in return.
And so to get that money, he would have to
go do that stuff, and that's a you basically can't.
(35:09):
You can't run a marathon every day and then spend
the evening at like fundraising events. One fundraising event with
zero exercise in a day would wipe me out right.
Imagine doing a handful of him. And after you ran
a marathon that day, you also ran a marathon the
day before and the day before that, et cetera.
Speaker 3 (35:29):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1 (35:31):
All of the press wasn't kind too, which really really stinks.
There were some columnists who was like, you know, you're
putting your life at risk, like kind of degrading him
for that, which is something I don't understand. He you know,
they were like little offhand kind of like quotes they
would get from his friend Doug and from his brother
(35:52):
about like Terry snapping at them or for something. So
sometimes they would paint him as like a tyrant or
having like a really bad temper, which apparently had a
bit of a temper, but like that's it's not the
lead of the story here newspapers, So it's that's really disappointing.
Speaker 2 (36:06):
Yeah, And it's also one of those things like put
yourself in his position, like would you would you would
your patience be thin? You know? So he was actually
like I think actually after that newspaper article accused him
of cheating, he called the newspapers like, you better print
a retraction, and they did. But I feel like that
(36:26):
kind of like changed his perspective on things after that,
and it really kind of brought him down, and he
was I don't it might be overstating it to say
like he was on the verge of giving up, but
he really kind of his spirits had been had taken
a beating from that experience. And then along comes this
little kid inspiration in a ten year old package, a
(36:49):
boy named Greg Scott who has bone cancer himself and
as a matter of fact, his leg was amputated as well,
and he idolizes Terry Fox. He had been following him
basically ever since the Toronto Star sort of reporting on
him and he was hoping he could accompany Terry on
some of the run.
Speaker 1 (37:09):
Right on his bicycle, which is just amazing. So all
of a sudden, you've got this one kid with a
prosthetic leg, a ten year old riding his bike. You
got Terry Fox, you know, literally running a marathon a day. So,
like the press coverage on this is just being amped
up even more and it really obviously inspired Terry, like
you're saying to keep going. At about thirty three hundred
(37:33):
miles into his run, Terry started, you know, he had
a persistent cough, but he started feeling worse and he
was like, I might have the flu or something, but
he was like, I got to push through. He never
took a day off in his entire run, we should mention.
So he runs twenty miles that day. Anyway, the next
day he runs twenty three and gets to thunder Bay, Ontario,
(37:53):
and is like the pain his just is getting worse
and worse, and it spreads to his neck and he's like,
maybe him having a heart attack, and I'm going to
die out here, So I got to.
Speaker 3 (38:03):
Go to the hospital.
Speaker 1 (38:05):
He goes to the hospital and they said, you have
a partially collapsed lung. We got to do some X
rays and investigate what's going on. And Terry has a
feeling like, I think my cancer has spread, and very
sadly he was right.
Speaker 2 (38:19):
He was. After a couple of days in the hospital,
they came back to him and they said, your cancer's metastasized.
Your bone cancer is now growing in your lungs. And
it turned out that he had a golf ball sized
tumor in one lung and a fist sized tumor in
the other lung. Don't forget his large heart that he
started out with and again running on a prosthetic leg
(38:42):
that from circa nineteen eighty And this was, I mean again,
like just to have that life shattering news twice, and
not only that, He's like, I can't this is it.
I can't run anymore. Now I have to stop and
treat this cancer. So he called off the run. Very sadly,
(39:03):
he said that I'm going to have to go do
this at least for now, but I'm going to try
to continue after I beat this cancer. And you know,
you guys hang in there with me. And just the
devastation from having to stop, and he had gone well
over the halfway point which I found perplexing because Ontario
is not even the middle province. I think Manitoba is.
(39:27):
So I was like, he made it to thunder Bay, Ontario,
but he made it all this way. He had hugged
essentially the Canadian American border, and that had a lot
of ups and downs and ups and downs. After thunder Bay,
it was basically a straight line out to Vancouver. So
when he stopped, and that had to make it all
the more frustrating. When he stopped, he was like, I
(39:49):
have done the hardest part. The rest of it is
like cake. But he knew that he had to quit.
Speaker 3 (39:55):
He did, yeah, very sadly.
Speaker 1 (39:57):
It was one hundred and forty three days into the run.
He averaged twenty three point three miles a day, which
is just incredible, raised two million dollars.
Speaker 3 (40:07):
Which is double his goal.
Speaker 1 (40:09):
But he would end up sort of inadvertently raising a
lot more money because in September of nineteen eighty there
was a telethon on TV obviously, and forty eight hours
there were you know, Elton, John, John Denver, the great
Gordon Lightfoot of course, and Anne Murray, great Canadians, Glenn Campbell,
(40:30):
all these musicians got together and performed at a telethon.
It was a five hour live event, raised ten million
dollars to add to his two million that he raised,
and so I mean that was twelve million dollars just
in nineteen eighty alone.
Speaker 2 (40:47):
Yeah. And then I think five months after that Marathon
of Hope or Telethon of Hope, he achieved a follow
up goal that he had, which was raising a dollar
for every Canadian citizen, which came to twenty four point
one seven million dollars Canadian dollars in nineteen eighty money,
which from the calculations I made, is equal to just
(41:11):
over ninety three million Canadian dollars today.
Speaker 3 (41:16):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (41:16):
Yeah, and just what he started in April and this
was September that he managed to do that, by that's tough.
Speaker 1 (41:24):
So after months of treatment, he got pneumonia in June
and nineteen eighty one, went into a coma and passed
away very sadly on June twenty eighth at the age
of twenty two years old.
Speaker 2 (41:40):
So as you can imagine, like the Canadian people and
everyone following this took this quite hard, and he was
immediately memorialized even while he was alive. He was memorialized
he was the youngest person to receive the Companion of
the Order of Canada, Canada's highest civilian honor, the Order
of the Dogwood, which is Columbia's version of the camp
(42:02):
Companion of the Order of Canada. He was inducted into
the Sports Hall of Fame in Canada, all this while
he was alive and as the youngest person, and then
after he died, it just mushroomed from there essentially.
Speaker 3 (42:15):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1 (42:16):
He's been on a couple of postage stamps in Canada.
This is I remember this happening. Actually at the twenty
ten Olympic Games in Vancouver, his mom Betty, served as
one of the eight flag bearers for the Olympic flag
opening ceremonies.
Speaker 3 (42:33):
Very incredible moment.
Speaker 1 (42:35):
And you know, he's, like I said, everywhere we went
in Canada and Q and A, someone asked us to
do a story on Terry Fox. So he's still very
much taught about in schools there. His legacy today is
probably the Terry Fox Run organized by the Terry Fox Foundation.
They separated from the Canadian Cancer Society in nineteen eighty eight,
(42:58):
but every year the second Sunday after Labor Day, which
is coming up, kids, adults, people all across Canada go
for a run to raise money for cancer research and
to honor Terry.
Speaker 2 (43:10):
Yeah, just coincidentally, we had no idea, but this episode's
going to come out a couple of weeks before the
Terry Fox Run, so you can go try it yourself.
It's September twentieth this year, and yeah, just go look
up the Terry Fox Run and you can find a
place near you that you can join a team and
do some fundraising and all that good stuff. And it
doesn't matter how far you run or how long, or
(43:33):
if you've ran before, it doesn't matter. It's all just
about raising money for cancer research and of course honoring
Terry Fox for what he did. Again, over the course
of about a year, this kid became one of the
greatest Canadians of all time, one of the greatest people
of all time.
Speaker 1 (43:51):
Yeah, for sure. And you don't have to be just
in Canada to take part in that. The Terry Fox
Run happens all over North America and South America. It
happens in country. He's in Europe, Syria, Thailand, New Zealand.
It's all over the place. And as of this year,
that foundation has reached its one billion dollar raise for
cancer research.
Speaker 3 (44:11):
That's awesome, man, incredible.
Speaker 2 (44:13):
So that's Terry Fox. Heads off Terry Fox. There's all
sorts of footage of him doing his thing on YouTube
and all sorts of stories, and there's at least a
couple TV movies, one of which ran frequently on HBO
back in the Yeah. So go check out more on
Terry Fox and be inspired. And in the meantime, I
(44:35):
think it's time for listener mate.
Speaker 1 (44:38):
We got an email from a guy named Adam about
remember when I was saying the space ghettos for space
spice girls. Yeah, and people are writing in now with
more of these fun things, which is, if you say
this and like this accent, it sounds like this in
another accent.
Speaker 2 (44:55):
Let's hear it.
Speaker 1 (44:56):
Hey, guys, your tangent of saying words it sound like
other words really made me smile as my friends and I.
Speaker 3 (45:00):
Used to say these all the time.
Speaker 1 (45:02):
I was delighted. I hadn't heard your example in the
episode before. But here are the ones that we said
most often. If you say beer can with a British accent,
it sounds like bacon in Jamaica, So bier can.
Speaker 2 (45:17):
Oh.
Speaker 1 (45:17):
Yeah, I guess nice if you got to say it,
that wasn't great British accent.
Speaker 3 (45:21):
But I see what he's saying.
Speaker 1 (45:22):
And then Adam says, saying, rise up lights in a
British accent sounds like razor Blades in Australian.
Speaker 3 (45:32):
So hand me some of those. Hand me some of
those rise of lights.
Speaker 2 (45:38):
Yeah that sounded exactly like that, didn't you think so
razor blades. I'm really intrigued by this. I feel like
we've just cracked into a whole world that I didn't
know existed.
Speaker 3 (45:49):
Yeah, it's a thing. I can't believe you had never
heard of any of these.
Speaker 2 (45:51):
No, I've led a very sheltered line.
Speaker 3 (45:54):
Yeah all right, Well the doors are open to you now.
Speaker 2 (45:57):
My friend. I know the doors of perception have been
thrown open.
Speaker 3 (46:01):
And that is for Adam.
Speaker 1 (46:03):
He says, enjoy listening to you guys in my commute,
especially the tangents and long running jokes.
Speaker 3 (46:07):
Cheers from Adam.
Speaker 2 (46:09):
Thanks Adam, that was great. I would love to hear
some more of those two, so keep them coming, everybody. Yeah. Same,
And if you want to share something about Terry Fox
or some other inspirational person, or you just want to
say hi, or you want to say pipe down back there,
it doesn't matter. You can send it in an email
to stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3 (46:31):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit
Speaker 2 (46:36):
The iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Welcome to stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. This is Josh, and
there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, And we are gonna
go back to Canada because we had such a nice
time there in June and July that Yeah, we're gonna
do it all Canadian episode.
Speaker 3 (00:27):
Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
We did six shows across Canada. It was our pleasure
to be there as their guests. Yes, and all across Canada.
I feel like during Q and A, people would ask
us why we haven't or would we and maybe why
we haven't. That's like the rudest a Canadian could ever get.
It's like very sheepishly to say, why haven't you guys
(00:49):
covered Terry Fox yet?
Speaker 2 (00:51):
Yes, it's specifically. There are two people worth calling out.
The first is William the First. He was the birthday
boy at our Montreal show. We called them William the
First because there were a few other Williams who asked
questions asked after him. But I saw he and his
mom he asked us to do Terry Fox. And then
the next day I ran into him and his mom
at the train station and they elaborated further on how
(01:14):
great Terry Fox would be for an idea for an episode.
And then the other guy, Chris, who met us at
the airport in Winnipeg, they also suggested it too, So
Canada you can thank William the first and Chris.
Speaker 3 (01:27):
That's right. Before we get started.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
We do want to mention though, that we are going
on a cruise, a stuff cruise.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
Right, yes, stuff at sea and Chuck, it's not even
a cruise, buddy, it's so high falutin.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
It's a voyage, that's right. It is a voyage. And
we are departing from New York City from Brooklyn actually
on October second, sailing to Bermuda and then back to
New York. We have since learned that our live show
will be on day two, yes, of the voyage, at
four pm, and we're still getting confirmation on exactly how
(02:08):
you sign up for that specific thing, but just you know,
a lot of people have signed up. The boat is
filling up, and if you want to come out and
go on a sea voyage with us and our other
stuff colleagues, there's lots of fun, fun stuff, planned stuff,
stuff stuff.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
Yeah, we're just gonna be hanging out on the boat
with everybody too, so it will be a good time.
And that show, like you said, it's early in the afternoon,
so our hope is that you can all be in
bed by six point thirty.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
That's right. We don't want to mess up anyone's dinner plans,
you know. Yep.
Speaker 2 (02:38):
So yeah, you just search stuff at sea on Virgin
voyages and you will find everything you need. And uh yeah,
so we'll see you guys in October coming up, Chuck,
that's like a month or so.
Speaker 3 (02:50):
I know, it's really snuck up on me.
Speaker 2 (02:52):
Same here, it pounds too.
Speaker 3 (02:54):
That's right. And now not to Terry Fox.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
Yeah, so I think a lot of I should say,
a lot of the world can be forgiven for not
having heard of Terry Fox. I actually feel kind of
like a shmo for having never ever heard of him
or what he did. Oh really, yeah, had you when
we were touring Canada?
Speaker 3 (03:14):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (03:14):
And you know, I uh not, because I'm just you know,
some sabant that knew about all of Canadian history as
a child. Sure, but I was a youngster who had
HBO and I watched the Terry Fox movie, the nineteen
eighty three movie with Robert Duvall, like more than three
or four times.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
Robert Duval seems old to play Terry Fox, right.
Speaker 3 (03:39):
He didn't play Terry Fox. But yeah, I saw that.
I saw that movie.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
You know, it was on HBO, And I saw every
HBO movie at least three or four times when I
was at age.
Speaker 3 (03:48):
H So that's how I know about the Terry Fox story.
It was from that.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
Film, Okay. Yeah, And that was definitely like when he
was part of like the immediate zeitgeist, Like he was
world famous. And what stands out to me too is
he was world famous for what he did over the
course of about a year, like he became like a
public figure and then basically what he did to put
(04:15):
himself on the map as a public figure and do
this amazing thing. I'm just teasing here. I'm not even
gonna say what he did yet it was basically over
the course of a year.
Speaker 3 (04:25):
Chuck, that's right, Uh, maybe we should say what he did.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
I agree, Okay.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
Terry Fox was a very brave, inspiring person, like like
you said, not only in Canada but throughout the world.
Because he had cancer. He lost a leg to cancer
and planned the Marathon of Hope where he was to
run clear across Canada with a prosthetic leg. And that's
probably all shit we should reveal for now.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
Yeah, yeah, let's let's go back to the beginning. We're
going to go back to Winnipeg where we were. That
was our last show in Canada. That was great. And
on July twentieth, nineteen fifty eight, if you had gone
to one of the fine hospitals in Winnipeg and asked around,
you might have found Raleigh and Betty Fox were having
a baby named Terry. Terry I think he was Terrence
(05:15):
Stanley Fox is what he was born. And very quickly
Terry said, this is it's way too cold in Winnipeg.
Let's move out to the Pacific coast where it's mild.
And Betty and Rawley said, let's do that. So the
family of six went out to I guess a suburb
of Vancouver, Port Coquitlam.
Speaker 3 (05:37):
Did you are you sure it wasn't a home birth?
Speaker 2 (05:39):
By the way, my goodness, that didn't even occur to me.
I mean, that would make it way harder to find
Betty and Rawleigh if you had to go house to house.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
I get to see that being like the first correction.
It's like, guys, they weren't in the hospital.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
Absolutely no. Like basically, if I have any chance of
getting it wrong, I'm going to get it wrong.
Speaker 1 (05:57):
So when Terry was a kid, he was really into
sports and really was his entire life. But he wasn't
you know, he wasn't blessed with the like the size
of an athlete. He wasn't a natural athlete. But he
was very determined, as we'll see, even as a kid.
So you know, there are plenty of stories from his
childhood where you know, he would go out for baseball
(06:18):
practice like an hour early, waiting at the corner for
his ride, or when he took up basketball.
Speaker 3 (06:25):
You know, he was not a big guy.
Speaker 1 (06:27):
He was one of the shortest and smallest kids in
his class in the eighth grade, so he would show
up early for practice. He would be the last one
to leave practice. And as the story goes on the
eighth grade team, he played one minute of actual basketball
on the court like during the season, and by tenth
grade he was the starting guard and by twelfth grade,
(06:48):
his senior year, he was voted co athlete of the
Year at his high school with his best friend Doug Allward.
Speaker 3 (06:55):
Is that cool, that's amazing.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
I mean. So that's just one of numerous stories about
how cool this kid was and how hard he tried
it everything and not just basketball. He also played soccer,
he played rugby, He ran cross country, and he got
into cross country when his basketball coach, when he was
playing very little at the time and still trying to
(07:17):
practice and get good, his basketball coach was like, maybe
give up basketball and go take up cross country, and
so Terry was like, I'll just do both.
Speaker 1 (07:26):
Yeah, And he said does that mean a run across Canada?
And they said no, that's just what you call the
sport when you're running through the woods and not on
a track.
Speaker 2 (07:33):
And he goes, yeah, run across Canada exactly.
Speaker 1 (07:37):
It hatched an idea after high school in his athletic
career there. He went to Simon Fraser University. He played
on the JV basketball team in college.
Speaker 3 (07:47):
Yeah, and was in a car wreck that fall. Didn't
get like super hurt.
Speaker 1 (07:53):
He was a little banged up, but he started getting
some knee pain and for about six months or so
he just kind of chalk that up to fall out
from that car wreck. Sure, and then that next spring
he was like, I should probably go to a doctor.
This is March of seventy seven, and when he was
at the doctor, you know, he heard those terrible words
(08:14):
that you hear in an appointment like that, which is, hey,
you have cancer.
Speaker 2 (08:20):
Yeah, specifically an osteogenic sarcoma, which is bone cancer that
starts in the knee. And this was a time where
cancer research and cancer treatment was the best thing you
could do for something like that was to amputate. Yeah,
you have to get not just the tumor out, but
all the cancer that's around it. And so they're like,
(08:42):
we just need to take off I think that six
inches above his knee. And he's eighteen at the time,
an athletic kid like this is for most people, most
eighteen year old boys who were like into sports, this
would just be life shattering, and I'm sure it was.
But he had an ability to kind of pick himself
up and be like, Okay, this is my new reality.
(09:04):
Let's see how I can excel in this reality too.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
Yeah, And I even remember that, and I kind of
scrubbed through some of the Robert de Bald movie. They
handle all that in about twenty.
Speaker 3 (09:16):
Seconds in the film.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
Really yeah, I mean, you know, it was an early eighties,
I guess it was a TV movie, but I saw
it on HBO.
Speaker 3 (09:24):
Maybe it was an HBO movie. I don't know.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
Hey, I believe that you saw it on HBO. You've
been so emphatic about it that even if it was
a TV movie, Even if the president of HBO at
the time came to me and said it wasn't on HBO,
I wouldn't believe him.
Speaker 1 (09:38):
It had to be, because why else would I have
seen it multiple times? Those TV movies just ran like
a movie of the week, and they were gone forever.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
Do you remember the one it was an after school special?
It wasn't a TV movie of the week, but it
featured Helen Hunt and she smokes PCP and runs and
jumps out of a second story window in her high
school because she's flipped out on PCP and it was
Helen that.
Speaker 3 (10:00):
Was on HBO. The Home Box Office, Sure, man, we
should get them as a sponsor. What a plug?
Speaker 2 (10:09):
Did you ever see? There's a video of the HBO,
the original HBO like I guess title card or whatever,
where Like it zooms through the street to this neighborhood
and all the lights are starting to come on, and
then it gets to the mountains and it says HBO
or whatever. That was an actual model. I saw people
(10:29):
filming in it and going through with this camera. It
was really amazing. There's a like a short video of it.
Speaker 3 (10:35):
It's great.
Speaker 1 (10:41):
Oh man, If we're not getting HBO money by the
end of this episode, I'm to be really upset.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
I also want to say to our new listeners who
are Canadian and haven't listened to us before but saw
Terry Fox episode and started to listen. This is pretty
much par for the course for every episode we've ever done,
and we're coming up on eighteen hundred of them.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
That's right, eighteen hundred times we've gotten sidetracked, probably times
three at least.
Speaker 3 (11:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
All right, So back to Terry Fox. He has gotten
this terrible diagnosis. He decides, you know, despite his amputation,
he's going to move forward as an athlete.
Speaker 3 (11:19):
He undergoes sixteen months of chemo.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
And that same summer that he like right after he
had this amputation, he goes out and is like, I'm
going to join a wheelchair basketball team. And not only that,
he joins the Vancouver Cable Cars in nineteen seventy seven
in a tournament and leads this team to back to
back national tournaments in seventy eight and seventy nine, Like
(11:44):
right out of the gate, man, he's after.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
It, right, So I mean by that time, he's what
nineteen maybe twenty for the second one. Have you ever
seen a wheelchair basketball game?
Speaker 1 (11:54):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (11:55):
Yeah, they're amazing.
Speaker 3 (11:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
There was a team called that I looked up the
name because I couldn't remember, but the Toledo Silver Streaks,
And I'm not sure how my mom got into it,
but we used to go to Silver Streaks games a lot. Yeah.
Oh that's early eighties. It was very cool.
Speaker 3 (12:09):
I never saw one live. I bet that's a Oh.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
Yeah, you saw him on TV? Was this on HBO?
Speaker 3 (12:15):
Just stop shame on you.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
Around this time, he meets a young woman named Rika
Noda and she became She became a very prominent figure
in his life, obviously as his girlfriend and someone who
would you know, would be by his side through this
whole next chapter that we're about to talk about.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
Yeah, and one other thing about him, So he when
he took to his wheelchair for wheelchair basketball, he already
had an artificial leg, a prosthetic, but he would train
in his wheelchair going up like mountain passes.
Speaker 3 (12:48):
Yeah, like he he.
Speaker 2 (12:51):
It wasn't just like level roadways. It wasn't just like
going to the gym. Like he would figure out like
the hardest thing you could do to train, and then
that's what he would go do.
Speaker 3 (12:59):
Yeah, pretty smart.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
Like I bet when he got on the basketball court
he's like, this is a piece of cake compared to
going up a mountain exactly.
Speaker 2 (13:06):
Yeah, do you want to take a break now, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:09):
Let's take a break and we'll be right back with
more on the Great Terry Fox.
Speaker 2 (13:33):
Okay, Chuck, so dialing it back a minute. The night
before Terry's leg was amputated, it was his right leg,
and again it was about six inches above his knee
was where they amputated. And the night before, his high
school basketball coach, a guy named Terry Fleming, brought Terry
Fox an article about a guy named Dick Traum who
(13:55):
was the first amputee to run the New York City Marathon.
From what I could tell, he may have been the
first amputee who ran any kind of marathon. And he
became after a car accident took his leg. He became
an activist for accessibility, and so it was a pretty
inspiring article. You know, and it just got right through
(14:20):
to Terry Fox, like it was about the perfect thing
that his high school coach could have done for him.
Speaker 1 (14:26):
Yeah, for sure, because he hears his story, and I
mean almost immediately afterward, it's like, I know what I'm
going to do, Like I know what my immediate life
purpose is. I'm going to run across Canada and I'm
going to raise money for cancer research.
Speaker 2 (14:40):
Yeah. And he also was kind of driven to raise
money for cancer research because one of his doctors had
told him that if he'd been diagnosed just a few
years earlier, he would have gotten way way worse treatment,
like it was just advancing and just a couple of
years ago his survival, his chance of survival would have
(15:02):
been way less. So he was like, Okay, actually doing
cancer research is definitely worthwhile too, right.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
Like they're making gains and can make even more with
more money and more research.
Speaker 2 (15:13):
Exactly, you always say it better than me.
Speaker 3 (15:16):
That's not true. So he keeps this.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
He didn't make some huge announcement at first. He told Rika,
his girlfriend, He told his best friend Doug, and they
start kind of training in private again, just sort of
keeping it quiet at his local junior high and the first.
You know, prosthetics have come a really really long way
since since Terry Fox's prosthetic leg.
Speaker 3 (15:42):
Yeah, I guess we could talk a little bit about that.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
So the guy who designed his leg, his name was
Ben I guess Spiker was how i'd pronounce it. It was,
you know, pretty new and like the development of artificial
limbs that you could actually like use for running and
you know, to be athletic on. It was a sort
of a radical idea at the time, I guess, yeah,
(16:07):
And so they settled on something pretty simple. They didn't
want to get like too wacky with it. They just
you know, were like, this needs to be suctioned onto
your remaining leg and there's no shock absorption. It's going
to be straight like this is, you know, pre when
they had things obviously like these days when you have
(16:29):
stuff like Oscar Oscar Pistorius and those like blades that
he runs on, they're like a pound each. This thing
weighed nine pounds and was just straight. So it really
modified the way Terry had to use it and had
to run.
Speaker 2 (16:44):
Yeah, because he did. He lacked the muscles like he
had hamstrings, but they didn't reach down to his knee.
Or his calf, same with his quadricepts, so he ended
up having to do all of the work of running
with his right hip muscles. And again there was also
no shock absorption, and Ben Spiker was really trying. They
worked on a lot of different models. One of them, yeah,
(17:06):
was like a pogo stick. Basically it was based on
a pogo stick. And like you said, they finally ended
up on a simple version. And the simple version actually
proved to be pretty smart because when he started his
marathon of Hope, it needed to be repaired a couple
of times along the way.
Speaker 1 (17:24):
Yeah, I mean, I think there was this one story
where a guy at an auto body shop repaired it
with like.
Speaker 2 (17:29):
Car parts seventy eight Malibu.
Speaker 3 (17:31):
Parts, hey styling.
Speaker 2 (17:34):
Yeah, and then there was a welder I think in
Salt Saint Marie who fixed who repaired it at one
point too. So the fact that it was simple helped
him in the long run, even though it was excruciating
to run on like he very frequently, I think basically
the entire time every day he had blood like coming
(17:55):
down where his prosthetic met his leg.
Speaker 1 (17:58):
Yeah, for sure. The artificial foot was made from rubber
and wood. They I mean, they did the best they
could with absorbing impact, but it was not great. So
he had to adapt, like I said earlier, his running
style into what they called a hop and skip running
style where he hopped on his left leg and then
would swing that prosthetic leg forward and then skip back
(18:21):
again to his left leg. So, if you've ever obviously
seen the great HBO movie, I think there was one
in the early two thousands as well, they did another movie.
I haven't seen that one, or just seen a clip
of the real Terry Fox. Right, you know it's it
can only be best described as like an awkward running
style that you just had to grit your way through.
Speaker 2 (18:45):
Yes, that's exactly right. And if you also, Chuck are interested,
I believe three iterations of his artificial leg, starting with
the first and then going to the one he ran on.
They are at the Royal British Columbia Museum, I think,
on display. Yeah, there's a bunch of stuff about him
(19:05):
on display there now, all.
Speaker 1 (19:07):
Right, So they eventually land on a version again that
these days it seems very archaic, but back then it
did the job. Still a lot of discomfort, but he
could start to run longer and longer, and he started
training more and he finally entered his first race in
August of seventy nine. This is just six months after
he started training, and he was like, I'm just gonna
(19:29):
get out there and run, like try and get halfway
through it, just to see what I can do. But
he ended up running seventeen miles finish the race.
Speaker 2 (19:38):
Yeah, and actually he finished last, but he was just
ten minutes behind the last two legged runners. So he
also got his first taste of being cheered on by
a bunch of strangers who were moved by his determination
essentially to become a key theme in the life of
Terry Fox. So he was like, okay, I can totally
do this. I think when he started he covered like
(20:02):
five thousand kilometers I think during his training period. And
this is not over a terribly long time, I think
you said. He entered his first race in August of
nineteen seventy nine. He started the Marathon of Hope in
April April of eighty right, So okay, so within a
year he'd already covered five thousand kilometers in a prosthetic leg.
(20:24):
So he's like, I can totally do this, And he
told his parents his mom later said I told them
something along the lines of I think you're crazy for
trying this, But I read that his dad was like,
when are you going to start? It was just the
way I think people approached Terry, Like he was known
to be very stubborn and determined. Yeah, obviously, but he
(20:45):
was like, you know, the point here is not for
me to show off. It's to raise money for cancer
research in Canada. And like he figured out that doing
this was going to attract a lot of attention and
he could use that attention to say, hey, thanks for
the support, donate to cancer research. He needed the help
(21:07):
of the actual like Canadian Cancer Society, And at first
when he approached them, they were like, that's a good idea, kid,
but we're not really convinced it's going to do anything.
Speaker 3 (21:18):
Yeah. I mean, you know, he was trying to raise
a million bucks. That was his goal. Obviously.
Speaker 1 (21:23):
The Canadian Cancer Society, like any organization like that, gets
a lot of queries and sponsorship requests from people. Sure,
so to them, I think this was just another one
of those. And they said he was pretty dogged though,
and they said, all right, listen, kid, if you can
get some other people on board as sponsors, then we'll talk.
(21:44):
So he and his mom wrote to a bunch of
corporations and it was pretty amazing.
Speaker 3 (21:50):
They got a lot of support right out of the gate.
Speaker 1 (21:53):
The Ford Motor Company donated a camper van because they
needed a van to ride along on this whole run.
Speaker 2 (21:59):
Yes, they also donated the grass gas or ass sticker
that it came with.
Speaker 3 (22:04):
That's right. I've onally bought one of these.
Speaker 1 (22:07):
I think I told you that, No you didn't, Yeah,
a couple of years ago. It's my favorite bumper sticker
of all times. Yeah, that's hot one. And I put
it on the I have stickers on the big, huge
heavy trash can at my camp.
Speaker 2 (22:21):
Oh cool, Yeah I did.
Speaker 3 (22:22):
I couldn't. I didn't put it on my car.
Speaker 2 (22:24):
It's gonna say, this is a twist I had not expected.
Speaker 3 (22:28):
Yeah, yeah, hits at the camp.
Speaker 1 (22:30):
So they donate the camper van, Adidas donates twenty four
pairs of their running shoes. Yeah, Imperial Oil and safe
Way donated food and gas money, and then Pacific Western
Airline said all right, we'll fly everyone out to Newfoundland.
Where are you going to start this thing? And you know, godspeed?
So he had those sponsors. Secured went back to the
(22:52):
Canadian Cancer Society and they were like, all right, kid,
you know, he went out and did what we asked
you to do, so we're gonna get behind you in
the Marathon of Hope forty six hundred mile how many
kilometers is.
Speaker 2 (23:05):
At something like seventy four hundred kilometers I.
Speaker 1 (23:08):
Think, all right, starting out in Saint John's, Newfoundland, all
the way to Vancouver, his home, and they were going
to begin, like I said, April nineteen eighty. So, you know,
we talked about the physical training that happened. There was
also the mental game because obviously to undertake something like this,
it requires you know, the head, the heart, the physicality
(23:29):
to do it all. And so he realized early on, like,
I can't think of this as a seventy four hundred
kilometer run. I need to think of it as like
one day at a time, and then within that day
to break it down, like maybe I can run the
next mile, and then once I've finished that mile, I
(23:50):
can get another mile. And apparently on days that were
really really tough on him, he'd say, I just need
to run to that next stop sign or to that
next corner. He would count telephone polls and do math
problems in his head to distract from just the literal
physical pain that he was going through.
Speaker 2 (24:07):
Yeah, which is probably the most difficult thing you can
do as a runner. A long distance runner math so
much so. I remember, probably ten years ago, there was
an article that profiled the woman who had I believe
it's retrograde amnesia, where you like just reset like every
couple of minutes or every few seconds, depending on how
your amnesia is. Yeah, and she was she was protested
(24:34):
by other runners, like professional runners, as having an unfair advantage.
Speaker 3 (24:38):
Oh interesting, because they're.
Speaker 2 (24:39):
Like that whole like h the as Iron Maiden put it,
the loneliness of a long distance runner never built up
for her. So they were like, that's not fair. But
that just goes to show you how awful that the
mental part of running is so much more than the
physical part. That they were like, this is this is
not fair.
Speaker 3 (24:58):
And I guess awful competitive li long distance runners are right,
like what are you kidding me?
Speaker 2 (25:04):
Yeah, they're like, have you never heard of dick troum
and accessibility?
Speaker 3 (25:08):
Wow, that's that's nuts. I can't believe they did that.
It's not fair. She can't remember how awful it's been
for that past hour.
Speaker 2 (25:16):
That's pretty much the message. Sure, wow, all right.
Speaker 3 (25:19):
Obviously I'm kidding about long distance runners. They're great people.
Speaker 1 (25:21):
Sure, So he was getting dizzy spells, he would get
double vision. He figured, like, it's just exhaustion. Obviously, he
had to get a certificate of health from a cardiologist
from the Canadian Cancer Society to even undertake this. And
when he did this, a doctor diagnosed him with an
(25:42):
enlarge heart, which is not the most uncommon thing for
like an athlete like this. But the doctor was like, hey, listen,
if you get out there and you're short of breath
and you're dizzy, like you've got to stop running. And
he just kept terry, kept quiet about the fact that like, yeah, buddy,
that's already happy and I'm pushing through.
Speaker 2 (26:01):
Right, he said to himself quietly, nuts to that exactly.
So he's gonna start running across the entirety of Canada
with an enlarged heart on a prosthetic leg in nineteen
eighty and I feel like that's a great place for
a break. And when we come back, we're going to
kick off the Marathon of Hope. Chuck.
Speaker 3 (26:22):
All right, we'll be right back. All right, here we are.
Speaker 1 (26:44):
It's April twelfth, nineteen eighty. I have just turned nine
years old. I don't know about Terry Fox yet because
the movie hasn't been made.
Speaker 2 (26:53):
I'm coming up on four.
Speaker 3 (26:55):
See that's why you didn't know. You didn't know about
Robert Daball and HBO when you were four.
Speaker 2 (26:58):
Oh, I knew all about Robert Duvall.
Speaker 1 (27:03):
Big a pocketlyps now fantoms for sure. So Terry Fox
begins his Marathon of hope. He started off by dipping
his prosthetic leg into the Atlantic Ocean on the coast
of Newfoundland, and his goal was, all right, this will
be easy. I'll just go out and run about a
marathon a day until I reach Vancouver, and maybe I
(27:28):
can raise a million dollars by doing this. So lofty goals,
you know, to raise a million bucks. It sounds kind
of quaint now, but that you know, it's a lot
of money back then. I mean it's a lot of
money now obviously, but if you're trying to like raise
money for cancer research today, somebody would obviously shoot way higher.
But that was a ton of money back then to raise,
and he it was quite at the beginning, because you know,
(27:52):
no one knew about Terry Fox at the time. So
he starts out running and there's like, you know, a
couple of photographers there from the local paper and like
six or eight people maybe clapping for him, and that's
how it all started.
Speaker 2 (28:05):
It did, and he got frustrated really quickly because he
had the full support and an encouragement of the Canadian
Cancer Society, but that didn't translate into actual action on
their part. Like for this thing to actually work, people
had to know in towns ahead of right schedule, Yeah,
so that you had volunteers who were coordinating stuff like
(28:28):
getting the word out to the press, like you needed
ccs like spokespeople talking to local newspapers and TV stations,
like you had to let people know so that they
could show up and see him, be moved by what
he was doing and then donate. Like that's just how
it had to go, or else he was just doing
this for almost nothing, and that's how it went for
(28:49):
like the first month. He would get very frustrated. When
he'd run through a town, sometimes rather large town, they'd
be like, who are you. We haven't heard anything about this,
And I think in the first month. The whole month,
all he'd raised was twenty five thousand dollars. And so
because of this, like he was getting frustrated, not just
(29:09):
with the cancer Society, but just frustrated in general. I mean, like,
I can't imagine how tired I would be after one
marathon rather than a month of daily marathons essentially, And
his friend Doug Alward had joined him to drive the
van basically slowly with him, and they were living together
in the van. So things were getting a touch tense
(29:33):
very early on.
Speaker 1 (29:34):
Yeah, for sure, I definitely remember this from the movie
that they were They argued a lot and they thought it,
why is that so funny?
Speaker 2 (29:42):
I just I don't know. I just imagined Robert Duval
driving the van and turn around saying, pipe down back there.
Speaker 1 (29:49):
No, no, he comes along later, Okay. So yeah, they
were at each other's throats a lot. You know, Terry was,
like you said, a stubborn guy. Apparently he had a
bit of a temper, and would you know, he and
Doug would get in fights. It was a lot to undertake,
Like the pressure of this guy was under to bite
off something this big and put himself out there like that. Obviously,
(30:10):
there was a lot of stress involved, so Terry's brother
Daryl joins them in New Brunswick to just sort of
add like a third piece to that to help defuse
the tension. I guess a little bit. You mentioned that,
you know, he wasn't getting a lot of attention at first,
apparently in Quebec. And this was, by the way, not
our experience there. We loved Montreal and we found the
(30:32):
people there to be wonderful. But apparently he didn't get
any publicity coming into town, didn't raise any money at
all in Quebec when he was running through and like
angered a lot of drivers on the road. Apparently they
tried to run him off the road. People were honking
at him. He tried running on the highway because it
had like a shoulder to run on, but the police
(30:54):
there like kicked him off the highway. So he didn't
get a warm reception in Quebec at first, right.
Speaker 2 (31:00):
And also didn't raise very much money throughout the whole province.
And I have to say again I agree with you,
the people of Montreal were amazing. I had two quebec
Qua taxi drivers, one in Vancouver, one in Toronto, and
both of them drove like total maniacs. I have to
(31:21):
at least say that they were great guys talking to him,
having fun, but they were maniacs. As one of them
actually turned around at one point where he's shooting down
at right turn only lane to cut in in front
of a bunch of traffic going quite fast, and he
turns around and he's like, how do you like my driving?
Speaker 3 (31:38):
Wow?
Speaker 1 (31:38):
All right, so maybe this tracks with his experience with
the drivers there. Terry Fox's yes, okay, all right. So
had it not been for the Toronto Star newspaper and
a reporter named Leslie Scribner, Terry Fox may not have
garnered such widespread acclaim because she was drawn to Terry's
story and hats off to the Toronto Star because they
(32:01):
really really got behind him such that they assigned her
to write a weekly column called Running with Terry, where
she went on the road with them, basically like reporting
on everything that's going on. And by the time they
get to Toronto, all of a sudden, he's running from
you know, Quebec. His spirits are down, no one really
(32:23):
even knows what he's doing, and he comes into Toronto
like almost like a national hero overnight.
Speaker 2 (32:29):
Yeah, pretty much. I read an article, I think from
the Toronto Star where they quoted they said a grandmother
age attendee. Her name was Edith Cathy. She gave a
quote to the paper where she said that she thought
she was in love for the first time. It's been
a long time since anyone has given me feelings, real feelings.
(32:51):
He just seemed to fill your life with something that
was missing. And like, that's kind of how he was
starting to inspire people. He was making people like feel
and it very quickly became the whole country and then
eventually spilled out of the borders of Canada into the world.
While he was doing this, he finally did what he
(33:13):
had set out to do. Like he had finally gotten
to the hearts of Canada and Canadians, and now it
was time for them to be like, we want to
support you. Here's some money for cancer research.
Speaker 3 (33:25):
Yeah for sure.
Speaker 1 (33:25):
And you know, he was a young, handsome guy and
so that certainly didn't hurt to capture the hearts of Canadians.
Speaker 2 (33:32):
And he had a cool name, yeah.
Speaker 3 (33:34):
Terry Fox. Great name.
Speaker 2 (33:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (33:36):
When he got to Toronto, they asked him to do
the kickoff of a football game there. Apparently when he
came on to the field. As the story goes, the
stadium announcer says, ladies and gentlemen, and like the rest
of it is drowned out because people are just going crazy.
He met Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, he met Bobby Orr,
the great hockey player, and Darryl Settler, another great hockey player,
(33:59):
apparently his idol. They gave him an NHL All Star jersey.
So money starts coming in, celebrity starts happening, and he
realized that, like, you know, this is exactly what he
wanted to help raise awareness and money, but it took
a toll on him, and that now every time he
goes to everyone wants to do an interview with him,
(34:19):
and everyone wants him to come to an inspirational speaking engagement.
So you know, he's running the equivalent of like close
to a marathon a day, so he's physically wrecked. He
has tendonitis in his ankle, he has a dry cough
that wouldn't go away, and he is all of a
sudden like has to deal like constantly with being interviewed
(34:41):
as a national hero, which was awesome but like really depleting.
Speaker 2 (34:45):
Not only that, like there were plenty of towns that
wanted to help him with fundraising events. But we need
you to come give a speech so the Chamber of
Commerce can have their picture taken with you for the
local paper, like that kind of stuff. Not just we're
going to support, we want something from you in return.
And so to get that money, he would have to
go do that stuff, and that's a you basically can't.
(35:09):
You can't run a marathon every day and then spend
the evening at like fundraising events. One fundraising event with
zero exercise in a day would wipe me out right.
Imagine doing a handful of him. And after you ran
a marathon that day, you also ran a marathon the
day before and the day before that, et cetera.
Speaker 3 (35:29):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1 (35:31):
All of the press wasn't kind too, which really really stinks.
There were some columnists who was like, you know, you're
putting your life at risk, like kind of degrading him
for that, which is something I don't understand. He you know,
they were like little offhand kind of like quotes they
would get from his friend Doug and from his brother
(35:52):
about like Terry snapping at them or for something. So
sometimes they would paint him as like a tyrant or
having like a really bad temper, which apparently had a
bit of a temper, but like that's it's not the
lead of the story here newspapers, So it's that's really disappointing.
Speaker 2 (36:06):
Yeah, And it's also one of those things like put
yourself in his position, like would you would you would
your patience be thin? You know? So he was actually
like I think actually after that newspaper article accused him
of cheating, he called the newspapers like, you better print
a retraction, and they did. But I feel like that
(36:26):
kind of like changed his perspective on things after that,
and it really kind of brought him down, and he
was I don't it might be overstating it to say
like he was on the verge of giving up, but
he really kind of his spirits had been had taken
a beating from that experience. And then along comes this
little kid inspiration in a ten year old package, a
(36:49):
boy named Greg Scott who has bone cancer himself and
as a matter of fact, his leg was amputated as well,
and he idolizes Terry Fox. He had been following him
basically ever since the Toronto Star sort of reporting on
him and he was hoping he could accompany Terry on
some of the run.
Speaker 1 (37:09):
Right on his bicycle, which is just amazing. So all
of a sudden, you've got this one kid with a
prosthetic leg, a ten year old riding his bike. You
got Terry Fox, you know, literally running a marathon a day. So,
like the press coverage on this is just being amped
up even more and it really obviously inspired Terry, like
you're saying to keep going. At about thirty three hundred
(37:33):
miles into his run, Terry started, you know, he had
a persistent cough, but he started feeling worse and he
was like, I might have the flu or something, but
he was like, I got to push through. He never
took a day off in his entire run, we should mention.
So he runs twenty miles that day. Anyway, the next
day he runs twenty three and gets to thunder Bay, Ontario,
(37:53):
and is like the pain his just is getting worse
and worse, and it spreads to his neck and he's like,
maybe him having a heart attack, and I'm going to
die out here, So I got to.
Speaker 3 (38:03):
Go to the hospital.
Speaker 1 (38:05):
He goes to the hospital and they said, you have
a partially collapsed lung. We got to do some X
rays and investigate what's going on. And Terry has a
feeling like, I think my cancer has spread, and very
sadly he was right.
Speaker 2 (38:19):
He was. After a couple of days in the hospital,
they came back to him and they said, your cancer's metastasized.
Your bone cancer is now growing in your lungs. And
it turned out that he had a golf ball sized
tumor in one lung and a fist sized tumor in
the other lung. Don't forget his large heart that he
started out with and again running on a prosthetic leg
(38:42):
that from circa nineteen eighty And this was, I mean again,
like just to have that life shattering news twice, and
not only that, He's like, I can't this is it.
I can't run anymore. Now I have to stop and
treat this cancer. So he called off the run. Very sadly,
(39:03):
he said that I'm going to have to go do
this at least for now, but I'm going to try
to continue after I beat this cancer. And you know,
you guys hang in there with me. And just the
devastation from having to stop, and he had gone well
over the halfway point which I found perplexing because Ontario
is not even the middle province. I think Manitoba is.
(39:27):
So I was like, he made it to thunder Bay, Ontario,
but he made it all this way. He had hugged
essentially the Canadian American border, and that had a lot
of ups and downs and ups and downs. After thunder Bay,
it was basically a straight line out to Vancouver. So
when he stopped, and that had to make it all
the more frustrating. When he stopped, he was like, I
(39:49):
have done the hardest part. The rest of it is
like cake. But he knew that he had to quit.
Speaker 3 (39:55):
He did, yeah, very sadly.
Speaker 1 (39:57):
It was one hundred and forty three days into the run.
He averaged twenty three point three miles a day, which
is just incredible, raised two million dollars.
Speaker 3 (40:07):
Which is double his goal.
Speaker 1 (40:09):
But he would end up sort of inadvertently raising a
lot more money because in September of nineteen eighty there
was a telethon on TV obviously, and forty eight hours
there were you know, Elton, John, John Denver, the great
Gordon Lightfoot of course, and Anne Murray, great Canadians, Glenn Campbell,
(40:30):
all these musicians got together and performed at a telethon.
It was a five hour live event, raised ten million
dollars to add to his two million that he raised,
and so I mean that was twelve million dollars just
in nineteen eighty alone.
Speaker 2 (40:47):
Yeah. And then I think five months after that Marathon
of Hope or Telethon of Hope, he achieved a follow
up goal that he had, which was raising a dollar
for every Canadian citizen, which came to twenty four point
one seven million dollars Canadian dollars in nineteen eighty money,
which from the calculations I made, is equal to just
(41:11):
over ninety three million Canadian dollars today.
Speaker 3 (41:16):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (41:16):
Yeah, and just what he started in April and this
was September that he managed to do that, by that's tough.
Speaker 1 (41:24):
So after months of treatment, he got pneumonia in June
and nineteen eighty one, went into a coma and passed
away very sadly on June twenty eighth at the age
of twenty two years old.
Speaker 2 (41:40):
So as you can imagine, like the Canadian people and
everyone following this took this quite hard, and he was
immediately memorialized even while he was alive. He was memorialized
he was the youngest person to receive the Companion of
the Order of Canada, Canada's highest civilian honor, the Order
of the Dogwood, which is Columbia's version of the camp
(42:02):
Companion of the Order of Canada. He was inducted into
the Sports Hall of Fame in Canada, all this while
he was alive and as the youngest person, and then
after he died, it just mushroomed from there essentially.
Speaker 3 (42:15):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1 (42:16):
He's been on a couple of postage stamps in Canada.
This is I remember this happening. Actually at the twenty
ten Olympic Games in Vancouver, his mom Betty, served as
one of the eight flag bearers for the Olympic flag
opening ceremonies.
Speaker 3 (42:33):
Very incredible moment.
Speaker 1 (42:35):
And you know, he's, like I said, everywhere we went
in Canada and Q and A, someone asked us to
do a story on Terry Fox. So he's still very
much taught about in schools there. His legacy today is
probably the Terry Fox Run organized by the Terry Fox Foundation.
They separated from the Canadian Cancer Society in nineteen eighty eight,
(42:58):
but every year the second Sunday after Labor Day, which
is coming up, kids, adults, people all across Canada go
for a run to raise money for cancer research and
to honor Terry.
Speaker 2 (43:10):
Yeah, just coincidentally, we had no idea, but this episode's
going to come out a couple of weeks before the
Terry Fox Run, so you can go try it yourself.
It's September twentieth this year, and yeah, just go look
up the Terry Fox Run and you can find a
place near you that you can join a team and
do some fundraising and all that good stuff. And it
doesn't matter how far you run or how long, or
(43:33):
if you've ran before, it doesn't matter. It's all just
about raising money for cancer research and of course honoring
Terry Fox for what he did. Again, over the course
of about a year, this kid became one of the
greatest Canadians of all time, one of the greatest people
of all time.
Speaker 1 (43:51):
Yeah, for sure. And you don't have to be just
in Canada to take part in that. The Terry Fox
Run happens all over North America and South America. It
happens in country. He's in Europe, Syria, Thailand, New Zealand.
It's all over the place. And as of this year,
that foundation has reached its one billion dollar raise for
cancer research.
Speaker 3 (44:11):
That's awesome, man, incredible.
Speaker 2 (44:13):
So that's Terry Fox. Heads off Terry Fox. There's all
sorts of footage of him doing his thing on YouTube
and all sorts of stories, and there's at least a
couple TV movies, one of which ran frequently on HBO
back in the Yeah. So go check out more on
Terry Fox and be inspired. And in the meantime, I
(44:35):
think it's time for listener mate.
Speaker 1 (44:38):
We got an email from a guy named Adam about
remember when I was saying the space ghettos for space
spice girls. Yeah, and people are writing in now with
more of these fun things, which is, if you say
this and like this accent, it sounds like this in
another accent.
Speaker 2 (44:55):
Let's hear it.
Speaker 1 (44:56):
Hey, guys, your tangent of saying words it sound like
other words really made me smile as my friends and I.
Speaker 3 (45:00):
Used to say these all the time.
Speaker 1 (45:02):
I was delighted. I hadn't heard your example in the
episode before. But here are the ones that we said
most often. If you say beer can with a British accent,
it sounds like bacon in Jamaica, So bier can.
Speaker 2 (45:17):
Oh.
Speaker 1 (45:17):
Yeah, I guess nice if you got to say it,
that wasn't great British accent.
Speaker 3 (45:21):
But I see what he's saying.
Speaker 1 (45:22):
And then Adam says, saying, rise up lights in a
British accent sounds like razor Blades in Australian.
Speaker 3 (45:32):
So hand me some of those. Hand me some of
those rise of lights.
Speaker 2 (45:38):
Yeah that sounded exactly like that, didn't you think so
razor blades. I'm really intrigued by this. I feel like
we've just cracked into a whole world that I didn't
know existed.
Speaker 3 (45:49):
Yeah, it's a thing. I can't believe you had never
heard of any of these.
Speaker 2 (45:51):
No, I've led a very sheltered line.
Speaker 3 (45:54):
Yeah all right, Well the doors are open to you now.
Speaker 2 (45:57):
My friend. I know the doors of perception have been
thrown open.
Speaker 3 (46:01):
And that is for Adam.
Speaker 1 (46:03):
He says, enjoy listening to you guys in my commute,
especially the tangents and long running jokes.
Speaker 3 (46:07):
Cheers from Adam.
Speaker 2 (46:09):
Thanks Adam, that was great. I would love to hear
some more of those two, so keep them coming, everybody. Yeah. Same,
And if you want to share something about Terry Fox
or some other inspirational person, or you just want to
say hi, or you want to say pipe down back there,
it doesn't matter. You can send it in an email
to stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3 (46:31):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit
Speaker 2 (46:36):
The iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
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