Soon after the start of this year’s major league baseball season, Joy O’Connell saw proof that she has made a difference. It came in the person of Philadelphia Phillies first baseman John Kruk, who pounded out three hits, including a double, in his first game.
Several months earlier, Kruk had been diagnosed with testicular cancer. He may not realize it, but O’Connell, 49, of the McHenry County village of Prairie Grove, is a big part of the reason he has a good prognosis and can continue his professional baseball career. There’s a chance that without O’Connell, Kruk and most of the nearly 7,000 men who each year come down with testicular cancer would die.
That was the case 24 years ago, when O’Connell lost her first husband, Brian Piccolo of the Chicago Bears, to a form of testicular cancer called embryonal cell carcinoma. Today, thanks in large part to research funded by the Brian Piccolo Cancer Research Foundation, founded by O’Connell and friends, most men with testicular cancer will live.
“Twenty-five years ago, 95 percent of the men who got embryonal cell carcinoma died. Today 95 percent of them are cured. Joy and her people have played a big part in that turnaround,” said Mortimer Chute, senior vice president of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Research Center in New York.
Piccolo, who signed with the Bears as a running back in 1965, received most of his cancer treatments at Sloan-Kettering. Sloan-Kettering researchers funded by Piccolo Foundation grants eventually developed an effective treatment for testicular cancer.
“It’s ironic and wonderful that almost as a direct result of the money Joy helped raise for us here, which is where Brian passed on, we were able to develop a successful treatment that is now the standard in this country and around much of the world,” Chute said.
“This little idea (of a foundation) has really grown,” said O’Connell, vice chairwoman of the organization. “We have a great group of volunteers. We don’t have a soul who gets paid, and when I think of all the money we’ve raised and all that we’ve done, it’s a great feeling.”
Piccolo was part of a Bears backfield that featured Hall-of-Famer Gale Sayers. But during the 1969 season, Piccolo began losing weight and developed a nagging cough. Tests revealed that he had testicular cancer and that cancerous cells had moved into his chest. On June 16, 1970, at age 26, Piccolo died.
The Piccolo Foundation came into being shortly after, when a group of friends and teammates suggested a golf outing to raise money in his name for cancer research. The golf outings and other activities have generated more than $3 million for cancer research, more than $2 million of which went toward the cure for testicular cancer.
Now that testicular cancer has been tamed, O’Connell and the Piccolo Foundation have turned their attention to funding breast cancer research at Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Center in Chicago. O’Connell also devotes much of her time and a portion of the foundation’s money to Clearbrook Center for the Developmentally Disabled in Rolling Meadows, where O’Connell’s 44-year-old sister, Carol, who has cerebral palsy, is a resident. Piccolo Foundation funds also go to Children’s Memorial Hospital in Chicago for bone marrow transplant research.
About 30 people serve on the foundation’s board of directors, and various organizations donate staff time and services. Since the foundation’s inception, O’Connell has been the glue that has held it together.
“Without Joy and support from the Bears, the foundation would have failed a long time ago,” said Piccolo Foundation chairman Billy deCicco, owner of Chicago Set Shop, a graphics and design firm in Chicago. DeCicco was a friend of Brian Piccolo’s and one of the organizers of the first golf outing.
“Joy is a wonderful spokesperson. She’s modest, unassuming, but she is persuasive and has a way of getting things done.”
Determined though she may be, O’Connell said she never thought the foundation would stay together this long.
“It was just friends who decided to have a golf outing to raise money for cancer research,” she said.
O’Connell has lived for 18 years in Prairie Grove, a sprawling, largely wooded village between Crystal Lake and McHenry. She and her husband of 21 years, Rich O’Connell, moved there from the south Chicago suburbs. They married after a mutual friend brought them together. Rich owns several ready-mix concrete companies, including Crystal Lake and Woodstock Ready-mix.
O’Connell is the mother of five children-three daughters from her first marriage and two sons from her current marriage. When Brian died, her daughters ranged in age from 18 months to 4 years.
“I was 26 and had three babies, and all of a sudden I had become a spokesman on cancer,” O’Connell said. “Everything just mushroomed. The next thing I knew, they were making a movie.” “Brian’s Song” is a tear-jerker about Piccolo’s illness and friendship with Sayers.
“Those were busy years,” she said. “I had good friends who helped me a lot.”
One of those good friends was Ed McCaskey of the Chicago Bears, who O’Connell said took her and her daughters under his wing and helped guide them through the rocky months during Brian’s illness and after his death. He has remained a friend and, at age 75, is now honorary chairman of the Piccolo Foundation.
During the late 1960s, McCaskey was working as a liaison between Bears owner George Halas and the players, and Brian Piccolo was a player representative.
“In many ways, Brian was like a son to me and Virginia,” McCaskey said, speaking of his wife. “After he got so sick, I’d be in New York as much as six weeks at a time with Joy. She showed a lot of courage and determination. She still has that determination.”
“Caring” is a word Jeannie Morris of Chicago immediately uses to describe Joy O’Connell. The two have been friends for 30 years, meeting through Morris’ then-husband, former Bears wide receiver and current TV sports reporter Johnny Morris.
“There are two projects that Joy gives countless hours to: Clearbrook Center and the Piccolo Foundation,” Morris said. “She has made some personal sacrifices for those causes, especially for the Piccolo Foundation. I don’t think people realize how much of a sacrifice Joy has made. It hasn’t been easy for her to be reminded of the pain she went through with Brian. And Rich is a special person, too. He has always supported Joy’s work. He’s a quiet man with tremendous strength of character.”
Asked about it all, Rich O’Connell smiles and describes his wife as “hard-working and dedicated.”
“My stepfather likes to stay in the background,” said Traci Piccolo Dolby, 27, of Chicago. “But he has supported the foundation and my mother in everything. I think a lot of people would have had a hard time handling all this, and that’s a tribute to him.”
