Nodes of Gold

It's been too, too long since I featured someone in Nodes of Gold.

*************************

F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, "Let me tell you about the very rich. They aren't like you and me."

Except when they get cancer.

With that in mind, here's another edition of Nodes of Gold -- strange and fascinating tales of famous people who have had Lymphoma. Joining Mr. T, Arte Johnson, Paul Azinger and others is.....

Senator Arlen Specter of the great state of Pennsylvania!

I've said it many times before: the Lympho Bob Blog doesn't do political statements, except to encourage people to write to Congress to increase funding for cancer research.

But since Specter -- a Hodgkin's Lymphoma survivor two times over -- has been in the news in the last week, I thought I had to induct him into my own little Hall of Fame. Specter, of course, made news for switching from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party -- or perhaps better to say "returning to" the Democrats, since he switched the other way in 1965.

Specter is a Yale Law School grad, and thus a former New Haven-area resident (always a plus for a Nodes of Gold awardee -- see the piece on Joe Andruzzi), and worked for the Warren Commission that investigated the Assassination of JFK. While on the Warren Commission, he co-authored "The Single Bullet Theory" which stated Kennedy and Gov. John Connally were each hit by the same bullet -- a key point in the Warren Commission declaring there was only one shooter. (I had planned on giving a link to something about this, but it's really easy to get sucked into conspiracy theory videos and web sites. I'll let you Google it on your own if you want.)

Specter was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1980, his third try for the office. His official Seante biography says he "has brought rugged individualism and fierce independence learned from his youth on the Kansas plains to become a leading Senate moderate." (What's kind of funny is that John McCain's and Bob Dole's official biographies say the same thing, and McCain wasn't even born in Kansas.)

In 2005, Specter was diagnosed with Hodgkin's Lymphoma. He bravely worked in the Senate while being treated with chemotherapy, which of course made him bald. His fellow Senator, John Sununu of New Hampshire, shaved his own head in solidarity. (However, there are no pictures on the Internet of Sununu with a shaved head, so I have my doubts that he actually did it. I mean, come on -- no pictures on the Internet of a Senator with a shaved head? And yet, you can find, like, a million pictures of this kid starting the whole swine flu pandemic?)

In 2008, Specter's Hodgkin's returned, and he underwent treatment again. Specter has been an outspoken advocate for cancer research funding, and has been very supportive of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.

******************************

Whenever I hear Specter's name, one particular memory always comes to mind:

February 1999, and President Clinton is being impeached. My son John had been born a few days earlier, and my mother-in-law was visiting. Specter, of course, has always been independent-minded, and not one to go along with what his party is doing just because it's his party (be warned, Democrats -- that 60 vote caucus is nowhere near guaranteed). When it was his turn to vote on impeachment, Specter didn't just vote "not guilty," he voted "not proven." My mother-in-law, who had been insisting the whole time that she was remaining neutral through the impeachment trial, shouted at the TV, "Shame on you Arlen Specter!" It was the harshest I've heard her speak in the 19 years I've known her.

The other great controversy on which Specter took a strong moral stand was "Spygate." In 2008, Specter wrote to NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell about his concern that the alleged tapes of alleged cheating by the New England Patriots had been destroyed illegally by the NFL. Specter felt that his beloved Philadelphia Eagles had been wronged by my beloved New England Patriots in their Super Bowl matchup. "My strong preference is for the NFL to activate a Mitchell-type investigation. I have been careful not to call for a Congressional hearing because I believe the NFL should step forward and embrace an independent inquiry and Congress is extraordinarily busy on other matters. If the NFL continues to leave a vacuum, Congress may be tempted to fill it." Specter backed off when he realized that (1) the Eagles' pathetic clock management was actually to blame for the loss, (2) members of Congress had better things to do than this -- like sell their stock holdings before the market collapsed, and (3) he himself had better things to do, like battle cancer.

*********************

Arlen Specter, U.S. Sentor from Pennsylvania, congratulations. You've taken Joe Biden's place as the Democratic Senator most likely to say something that the Democratic leadership needs to distance itself from the next day, and...

You've got Nodes of Gold!