Yawkey Foundation's $50 Million Gift to Dana-Farber
Long before there was a Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, there was a friendship between two men who believed the same improbable thing: that childhood cancer could be beaten.
Tom Yawkey met Dr. Sidney Farber in the early 1950s, when Dr. Farber’s idea that research could turn a hopeless diagnosis into a treatable one was still considered a long shot by much of the medical establishment. Tom didn’t need convincing. Beginning in 1952, he quietly supported Dr. Farber’s work out of his own pocket, in the same way he gave to so many causes during his lifetime: without ceremony and without publicity.
But Tom understood that Dr. Farber’s work needed more than private checks. It needed a champion. In 1953, he and Jean made the Jimmy Fund – Dr. Farber’s Children’s Cancer Research Foundation – the official charity of the Boston Red Sox. For decades afterward, Tom refused to allow advertising inside Fenway Park, with a single exception: the Jimmy Fund. Anyone who wondered where Tom Yawkey’s heart was needed only to look at the outfield wall.
The friendship deepened into partnership. Tom joined the board of trustees in 1954 and served alongside Dr. Farber for more than two decades, as president through the 1960s and as chairman until his death in 1976. When Tom died, Jean stepped into his seat on the board and chaired it herself, carrying forward a commitment that had become as much hers as his.
That is the story behind the Foundation’s recent $50 million grant to Dana-Farber – the largest we have ever made. It will help build a new 300-bed cancer hospital, the only one of its kind in New England, and support research, early detection, and care for patients and families. A new bridge across Brookline Avenue, connecting the Yawkey Center for Cancer Care to the future hospital, will carry Jean and Tom’s names.
Tom never sought that kind of recognition, and we suspect he would have waved it off. But a bridge feels right. It connects one place to another, the way Tom connected a ballclub to a cause, and the way his friendship with a determined doctor connected his generation to every one that has followed.
The work Dr. Farber and Tom Yawkey started together is not finished. Neither are we.
