"That Girl..........Made Room for Daddy"
Amos Muzyad Yaqoob Kairouz - The saint who never became a saint.
Danny Thomas was deeply devoted to St. Jude Thaddeus (the patron saint of hopeless causes). The world has once again come to know hopelessness. Where's Danny?
He was born Amos Muzyad Yaqoob Kairouz on January 6, 1912, in Deerfield, Michigan, the ninth of ten children born to Lebanese immigrants. His parents fled what is now Bsharri, Lebanon, and raised their family Catholic in Toledo, Ohio.
Money was always tight. The Kairouz kids shared shoes, shared beds, shared whatever food is on the table that week.
By 1932, twenty-year-old Amos performed on Detroit radio for almost nothing. He bounces between nightclubs, sleeps in cheap rooms, and takes any gig that pays. In 1936, he marries a singer named Rose Marie Cassaniti. A year later, Rose Marie is pregnant with their first child. Amos has no steady income and no plan.
He kneels in a church and makes a vow to St. Jude Thaddeus, the patron saint reserved for hopeless causes. Show me my way in life, and I will build you a shrine, he prays. He does not ask for money. He does not ask for fame. He asks only for a direction, something to build his life around.
1940 Chicago
Ashamed to tell his family he is back to working seedy clubs, Amos invents a stage name using two of his brothers' first names. Amos Kairouz becomes Danny Thomas. The new name sticks. So does the hustle. Radio parts lead to film roles. Film roles lead to a television pilot about a nightclub comedian raising a family.
1953.
"Make Room for Daddy" premieres. It runs for eleven straight years, and Danny Thomas becomes one of the most recognizable faces in America. He has the fame now. He has the fortune. He has not built the shrine. In the early 1950s, guilt catches up with him. Danny and Rose Marie start crisscrossing the country, city after city, asking strangers for donations toward a promise most of them have never heard.
Here's what makes it worse: Danny wants his shrine to be a hospital for children with cancer, in the Deep South, in 1955, where hospitals routinely turned sick children away for the color of their skin. His daughter Terre later says he carried a newspaper clipping in his pocket for years, about a child denied treatment at hospital after hospital simply because of his race.
Danny decides the shrine will accept every child. Any race. Any religion. Any family, whether they can pay a dollar or nothing at all. His old family friend Bishop Samuel Stritch, a Tennessee native, points him toward Memphis. A hematologist named Dr. Lemuel Diggs signs on to run the science. A Miami car dealer named Anthony Abraham becomes his closest fundraising partner.
February 4, 1962
Nine thousand people gather in Memphis to watch St. Jude Children's Research Hospital open its doors. It is the first fully integrated hospital in the American South. Families are told the same thing on day one that St. Jude still tells them today: they will never see a bill, not for treatment, not for travel, not for a single meal.
In 1962, a child diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia has a four percent chance of survival. Four in a hundred. Doctors elsewhere consider the disease a death sentence, full stop.
St. Jude launches an experimental approach combining multiple drugs at once, something almost nobody else is willing to try. Within ten years, the survival rate for that same leukemia climbs from four percent to fifty percent.
By the 1970s, Danny Thomas is sixty years old and still not slowing down. He tapes The Practice for NBC, reunites his old TV family for Make Room for Granddaddy, and somehow keeps flying city to city for St. Jude between every taping. Friends say he takes almost no nights off. He funnels his Maxwell House coffee commercial earnings straight into the hospital. He tells reporters the same line for decades: no child should die in the dawn of life.
St. Jude refuses to patent its discoveries. Every protocol, every breakthrough, gets published and mailed to doctors everywhere, free, so a hospital in another state or another country can save a child too.
1983
President Ronald Reagan hangs a Congressional Gold Medal around Danny Thomas's neck, honoring twenty-one years of a promise he almost broke. Danny is seventy-one years old.
Today, the leukemia survival rate St. Jude fought so hard for in the 1970s sits at ninety-four percent. Overall childhood cancer survival in America has climbed from twenty percent in 1962 to more than eighty percent now. A broke comedian from Toledo turned a desperate prayer into one of the most trusted names in medicine.
On February 6, 1991, Danny Thomas dies of a heart attack in Beverly Hills at seventy-nine years old. He is buried on the grounds of St. Jude in Memphis, inside the shrine he swore to a saint he would build. The hospital never sends its patients a bill. It never has.
Anyone can build success. Danny Thomas built a promise that outlived him by decades and is still saving children right now, today, whether or not anyone remembers the frightened young comedian who made it. Someone who needs to know - a promise made in your worst moment can end up saving thousands of lives you'll never meet.
Money was always tight. The Kairouz kids shared shoes, shared beds, shared whatever food is on the table that week.
By 1932, twenty-year-old Amos performed on Detroit radio for almost nothing. He bounces between nightclubs, sleeps in cheap rooms, and takes any gig that pays. In 1936, he marries a singer named Rose Marie Cassaniti. A year later, Rose Marie is pregnant with their first child. Amos has no steady income and no plan.
He kneels in a church and makes a vow to St. Jude Thaddeus, the patron saint reserved for hopeless causes. Show me my way in life, and I will build you a shrine, he prays. He does not ask for money. He does not ask for fame. He asks only for a direction, something to build his life around.
1940 Chicago
Ashamed to tell his family he is back to working seedy clubs, Amos invents a stage name using two of his brothers' first names. Amos Kairouz becomes Danny Thomas. The new name sticks. So does the hustle. Radio parts lead to film roles. Film roles lead to a television pilot about a nightclub comedian raising a family.
1953.
"Make Room for Daddy" premieres. It runs for eleven straight years, and Danny Thomas becomes one of the most recognizable faces in America. He has the fame now. He has the fortune. He has not built the shrine. In the early 1950s, guilt catches up with him. Danny and Rose Marie start crisscrossing the country, city after city, asking strangers for donations toward a promise most of them have never heard.
Here's what makes it worse: Danny wants his shrine to be a hospital for children with cancer, in the Deep South, in 1955, where hospitals routinely turned sick children away for the color of their skin. His daughter Terre later says he carried a newspaper clipping in his pocket for years, about a child denied treatment at hospital after hospital simply because of his race.
Danny decides the shrine will accept every child. Any race. Any religion. Any family, whether they can pay a dollar or nothing at all. His old family friend Bishop Samuel Stritch, a Tennessee native, points him toward Memphis. A hematologist named Dr. Lemuel Diggs signs on to run the science. A Miami car dealer named Anthony Abraham becomes his closest fundraising partner.
February 4, 1962
Nine thousand people gather in Memphis to watch St. Jude Children's Research Hospital open its doors. It is the first fully integrated hospital in the American South. Families are told the same thing on day one that St. Jude still tells them today: they will never see a bill, not for treatment, not for travel, not for a single meal.
In 1962, a child diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia has a four percent chance of survival. Four in a hundred. Doctors elsewhere consider the disease a death sentence, full stop.
St. Jude launches an experimental approach combining multiple drugs at once, something almost nobody else is willing to try. Within ten years, the survival rate for that same leukemia climbs from four percent to fifty percent.
By the 1970s, Danny Thomas is sixty years old and still not slowing down. He tapes The Practice for NBC, reunites his old TV family for Make Room for Granddaddy, and somehow keeps flying city to city for St. Jude between every taping. Friends say he takes almost no nights off. He funnels his Maxwell House coffee commercial earnings straight into the hospital. He tells reporters the same line for decades: no child should die in the dawn of life.
St. Jude refuses to patent its discoveries. Every protocol, every breakthrough, gets published and mailed to doctors everywhere, free, so a hospital in another state or another country can save a child too.
1983
President Ronald Reagan hangs a Congressional Gold Medal around Danny Thomas's neck, honoring twenty-one years of a promise he almost broke. Danny is seventy-one years old.
Today, the leukemia survival rate St. Jude fought so hard for in the 1970s sits at ninety-four percent. Overall childhood cancer survival in America has climbed from twenty percent in 1962 to more than eighty percent now. A broke comedian from Toledo turned a desperate prayer into one of the most trusted names in medicine.
On February 6, 1991, Danny Thomas dies of a heart attack in Beverly Hills at seventy-nine years old. He is buried on the grounds of St. Jude in Memphis, inside the shrine he swore to a saint he would build. The hospital never sends its patients a bill. It never has.
Anyone can build success. Danny Thomas built a promise that outlived him by decades and is still saving children right now, today, whether or not anyone remembers the frightened young comedian who made it. Someone who needs to know - a promise made in your worst moment can end up saving thousands of lives you'll never meet.
That's an incredible life, because he cared about humanity and an higher being. The conundrum is that Danny Thomas was both a Freemason and Shriner.
