Jay Weinberg '40 has a CAN-do attitude

Until ten years ago, Jay N. Weinberg '40 was just "a plain, ordinary citizen," as he put it. "I did everything everyone else did, Boy Scouts and whatever else the rest of the family was doing." He made it sound as if he followed his family's lead, but that's not so. Having been introduced to skiing at Dartmouth during his undergraduate years, he learned to love skiing and he taught his whole family to love the sport, too. He continued with another of his partmouth sports, competing four times with his son in the National Father and Son Tennis Championships at Longwood in Boston and at the Philadelphia Cricket Club. And he worked hard in the Avis car rental business which he started in Mount Vernon, N.Y., 27 years ago.

Then he got sick. Doctors discovered a melanoma, a malignancy, which had spread to his lung. The surgeons removed one lobe of his lung. "This shook me up and showed me what life is all about," Weinberg said.

When he recovered, he began to volunteer at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, talking to patients, helping them deal with their cancers and their treatments.

He noticed a common problem confronting many of the patients: the cost of transportation to and from the treatment centers. By itself cancer treatment is tremendously expensive; cancer patients often must travel long distances to the specialized treatment centers, and insurance companies rarely pay transportation costs.

Priscilla Blum, another recovered cancer patient,' thought of a possible solution: corporate aircraft often have empty seats on their routine business flights; they fly from smaller, less, crowded terminals than commercial flights do, and they frequently fly to the cities where cancer treatment centers are located.

Weinberg and Blum joined forces and founded the Corporate Angel Network (CAN) in White Plains, N.Y., to provide free transportation for cancer patients when they travel for treatment. (CAN's office is housed in the Champion International building at the Westchester County Airport. Instrumental in the donation of the office space was chairman of the board and chief executive officer of Champion International Andrew C. Sigler, Dartmouth class of '53.)

Initially CAN signed up 61 large corporations. The first flight, provided by the Safe Flight Instrument Corporation, took Michael Burnett, a young patient with whom Weinberg had been talking at Sloan-Kettering, home to Michigan for Christmas in 1981.

"(The program) started very slowly," Weinberg said. "It took a month to get the second flight. But then it mushroomed." Today, CAN arranges an average of 25 flights a month, works with 290 corporations and crisscrosses the United States. More than 70 specialized cancer treatment centers are on their itineraries, located primarily in Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Houston, Atlanta, and New York.

CAN depends on the patients' families and friends to get the patients to the corporate airports. But when that doesn't work, Weinberg has found other services to help. Limousines in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut volunteer free rides. The Marriott Hotels in the same area provide free rooms, on a space available basis. With, his Avis connections, Weinberg has arranged free rental cars for patients throughout the country when there is no other way to connect with their flights. Small volunteer groups donate their services to CAN, too. For example, the American Medical Flight Team in Las Vegas flies patients from out-of-the-way places to the companies' airplanes.

Not only transportation services are donated CAN'S entire 1984 operating budget of $75,000 is funded by contributions and a matching funds arrangement. This money pays for a full-time administrator who organizes 18 volunteers. Together they run the computer, sending out the newsletter, mailings, and packets of information, and make incredible numbers of long-distance telephone calls to complete arrangements. "It's a very small amount of money for what we do," says Weinberg.

This May, Weinberg went to Washington, D.C., to receive one of the 21 1984 President's Volunteer Action Awards on behalf of CAN. "I'm still enough of a beginner," he says, "that it's a great thrill to be served lunch at the White House with the president. I loved it!"

Helping others is a great thrill for him, too. In addition to his efforts with CAN, he has helped to found another program for cancer patients: the Patient-to-Patient Volunteer Program at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Thirty former cancer patients talk one-to-one with people currently undergoing treatment at the Cancer Center. Because the volunteers have gone through the disease and treatment, their perspective is different from that of the doctors and nurses. They can share experiences and encourage the patients. When the volunteers feel the patients need more help than they can give, they can turn to a social worker or a psychiatrist on the staff of the Volunteer Program for support. The numbers testify to its success: the 30 volunteers see 400-500 patients regularly.

Weinberg says it's a tremendous help, and he knows from "both sides of the bed," too. This spring, after being totally free of cancer for ten years, he underwent surgery for colon cancer. It was totally unrelated to his earlier lung surgery, and he says "they got it early enough so no follow-up treatment was necessary." While in the hospital, he asked his friends and family to donate to CAN rather than bring him books and flowers.

Now, Weinberg is back to playing tennis ("I've always had the desire to win!"); he is planning to ski in Utah with his family this winter; he's working at his Avis business with his son, checking in with "his" patients at Sloan-Kettering, and working with the Corporate Angel Network. "The way to win," he says, "is you gotta get in there and fight!"

Priscilla Blum and Jay Weinberg '40 founded the Corporate Angel Network in 1981 to provide no-cost transportation for cancer patients to centers that offer specialized cancer care.