She's a four-time Emmy winner, a Golden Globe winner, a Grammy-winning storyteller. She's received our nation's highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal Honor of Freedom. Across five decades she's conquered television, theater, bookshelves, audio, entrepreneurship, yet her most important stage has always been one of compassion. She's a champion for children, for families, and for hope. Let's welcome in the legendary Marlo Thomas. How you doing this morning Marlo? I'm doing great. Thank you for that lovely introduction. I'm so happy to be here. Any friend of Shaquille O'Neal is a friend of mine. I'll tell you that. I love him. Have you met him a few times? You and him both. Very, very giving people the both of you. Yeah, he came to some St. Jude Gallows and he was just wonderfully generous and fun. I like him a lot. He's a good guy and he had a good mom too. But I'm excited today to be able to talk about St. Jude Children's Research Hospital with you and your listeners. This is a big time of year for us for our thanks and giving campaign. You know, while we're out shopping in these holidays, buying all kinds of goodies and gifts for our friends and family, there are families at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital who aren't thinking about any of that. What they're thinking about is saving their child's life. I wanted to share something special with you about my career and St. Jude's. We're going to go back to the late 90s and I got my first radio job and I was like a 19-year-old kid just getting my footing and the station was given a chance to host one of those three-day St. Jude Country Radio Thons where you set up and you set it up in the local mall and right away I was very struck, Marlowe, by the professionalism of the St. Jude team. All of a sudden I'm on this stage and I'm interviewing these children and their heartbreaking stories where I'm into tears doing this broadcast and then you see complete strangers walk up and open their wallets and give whatever they can and by the end of that radio thong back in the late 90s, we raised over $100,000 and I still to this day, it's funny because I bring my kids back to that same mall some 25 years later and every time I go buy that jewelry store and smell that Cinnabon in that mall and I look at that spot, I say to my kids, that's where we raised $100,000 for St. Jude and they're like, dad, you already told us that story every year but it all these years, I don't know how many people tell me this. I don't know how many people say this to you, but all these years later, I still think about that broadcast 25 years ago and how much it meant to me and how I got emotional on the air and just what you guys do is simply amazing. Do you hear these stories all the time? I do. I love them. I love people who come up to me on the street and say, my cousin's grandchild, somebody just yesterday said this to me, my cousin's grandchild went to St. Jude and you saved her and then I meet people on the street who say, my grandma used to give $19 a month and then my mom gave $19 a month and now I'm giving $19 a month. So it's like a generational tradition to contribute to St. Jude. And I think the reason why so many people do contribute is that we've been open since 1962 and we've been saving children's lives since 1962 and if we don't save a child's life, everyone knows, every parent knows everything was done. Nothing was spared. All the money in the world was spent on that child. We try to keep every child alive. No child should die in the dawn of life, my father said. And that's our demand and our command. No child should die. Your dad has got to be very proud of you because you guys have raised over a billion dollars and I know a lot of that money goes to research and I'm curious from your perspective, what kind of breakthroughs are we seeing? And do you think like tools like artificial intelligence that we're hearing that it could help accelerate the fight against cancer, are we getting closer to a cure with this? Well, we're getting closer. I don't know anything about artificial intelligence. The intelligence we have at St. Jude is not artificial. They are scientists and researchers come from all over the world. That's like Babylon and our laboratories. They're from China, they're from Portugal, they're from Russia, they're from everywhere. And they're the best. We recruit the best in each field, whether it's eye cancer, brain cancer, blood cancer, soft tumors, bone cancer. We find the best scientists in every country and bring them to St. Jude where they will do their best work and create trials and treatments to save children in the hospital. And one child saved at St. Jude represents thousands of children everywhere who have that disease, which was before now called uncurable, incurable, and then we cure it. We've gone from 20% to 80% with all cancers, but this month, this December, we just announced an 88% survival rate with AML. AML is acute myeloid leukemia, which has been a killer for years. It's always been around 30%. And it's been growing, it's been moving up. And in this month, we announced at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital an 88% survival rate. And what's exciting about that is science is a collaboration. And we collaborated with nine other universities and hospitals where we all did the same St. Jude study with our 200 children. And of those 200, we could save a survival rate of 88%. That's what we do. We ask you to give thanks for those healthy kids in your life and give to those who are not. And you can do that by going to stjud.org and making a donation and also reading about all of our thanks and giving partners like Domino's and Chili's and the Melting Pot. Great restaurants are going to ask you to make a little donation on your bill. And then there's wonderful stores like K Jewelers and William Sonoma and Jay Crue and Dollar General and Pottery Barn, all these great places, AutoZone, you can just, they'll say, will you make a donation? Just add it to your bill, a dollar. It costs $2.7 billion a year to run St. Jude Children's Research Hospital to pay for all that science and research and the children who come for no money at all. And I think you know in your own families, everyone, you have a family member who goes to a hospital. It's so expensive, so expensive. You can give hope this holiday season at stjude.org. It's thanks and giving season and your donation is going to help keep the dream alive. You can visit stjude.org today. Marlo, I know you grew up around some of the most iconic performers in the world. You've got stories of Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole singing with your mother. What are some of the vivid memories? What are some of these vivid memories of you seeing them at your family parties when you would see Frank and you would see Nat King Cole? What do you remember from those days? I just remember the gaiety of it all. You know, Nat King Cole would play the piano and sing and Frank Sinatra would sing and my mother would get up and sing too. She was a singer. My father always said she had the voice of an angel and the guts of a prize fighter. She'd get right up and sing and I also remember vividly the dining room table. My father's best friends were Sincs Caesar, Milton Burl, Phil Silver, George Burns, and they'd sit around the table and they'd tell jokes and it was just so much fun and they loved the kids. You know, they'd ask us if we had a joke and we'd tell our stupid joke from school and they'd laugh and get a kick out of us. But there was a lot of fun and gaiety, non-competition, just good friends having a good time and I took that out of my childhood and it brought it into my life. You know, I have funny people around my table. We always tell jokes, have a good time. I like that kind of companionship and gaiety. Yeah. This holiday gives St. Jude kids the greatest gift, a chance at a lifetime. If you want to make an impact and donate to St. Jude, just visit stjude.org. You've done some great holiday films and Christmas episodes on all your television shows, including the Hallmark movie, A Magical Christmas Village, that is all part of this countdown to Christmas on Hallmark. But I'd like to go back to your own holidays growing up, Marlo. What were Christmases like around the Thomas house and what's one of your most treasured memories from Christmas as a child? Well, they were magical. You know, my parents were great celebrating as am I and we always had the gigantic tree, thousands of presents. And I think my most exciting Christmas memory was my dad was working in Chicago and he always came home for Christmas. But the next star, I don't know who it was, Nat King Cole or Frank Sinatra, who it was, but the next star got sick. So the club asked my father to stay for through the Christmas holiday and my dad said, oh, I can't, my wife will kill me. I got to be home for Christmas. But anyway, they pleaded with them. So my dad called my mom and said, we got to do this, you know, Frank or Nat or somebody was sick. They don't have anybody to do the work over the holiday. So my mother said, okay, but we're bringing everything. We got on a train. We have one whole compartment just for our presents. My mother wouldn't let us open the presents ahead of time. We got on the, I think it was called the Pacific train, whatever it was. We got on that train from LA to Chicago. And it was so exciting. We got to Chicago. There was snow. We were kids from LA. It was snow and the nightclub decorated the suite for kids. They had a train in it. I mean, it was the most, and they gave us a little chihuahua. They gave us so many presents and gratitude to my mom and dad for letting my dad stay and work through the holidays. But for us, it was a ball. We had, we had the snow and we had a train. We had a dog. We had a heck of a time. It was so fun. Well, you've made such an impact on so many people, including myself, Marlowe. And if you want to make an impact on one of these children and these families who pay nothing, by the way, when they go say it, stay at St. Jude, they don't have to dip into their wallet at all. And that's because of giving people like you. This holiday gives St. Jude kids the greatest gift and that's a chance at a lifetime. Go to stjude.org. Marlowe, thanks again. Merry Christmas. Happy holidays and God bless you. Oh, thank you. Thank you. God bless you too. Thanks for having me. Bye-bye. Bye.
