Clifford Ford Jr. was pretty sure he was being pranked when he got a call in early January telling him he’d won a contest and that he could choose a nonprofit organization to receive a $10,000 donation in his honor.
The 75-year-old from Morton, Washington, knew there was no such thing as free money.
Ford worked most of his life as a logger: a burly, bearded, self-described “tough son-of-a-gun” who could do just about every job in the woods, from setting chokers (cables used to haul logs) to driving lumber trucks. He asked the caller to contact his daughter, who quickly realized she was talking to Dan LeBlanc, vice president of Customer Experience for TCC, a Verizon authorized retailer where Ford had bought a phone — and that it was no prank.
It turned out that Ford had won a contest TCC created to reward its customers and strengthen the communities where it does business. Customers across the U.S. enter by opting in to receive the company’s text messages. Every quarter, one lucky winner gets a call like the one received by Ford, who entered the contest late last year after buying a phone at a TCC store in Centralia, Washington.
The call “was a real shocker,” said Ford, but it only took a minute for him to decide that the donation would go to Fred Hutch Cancer Center.
“Where else would I want to give the money,” he asked, “other than the place that saved my life?”
What LeBlanc didn’t say — what Ford wouldn’t learn until he came to Fred Hutch to present the check — was that the contest, called Get10Give10, also included a prize for him.
Fred Hutch has been a big part of Ford’s life since November 2022, when one day at work he found himself unable to swallow his daily vitamin pills. His boss sent him to the local ER, where imaging tests revealed a large thyroid tumor growing unnoticed behind his bushy beard. Ford’s physician referred him to Fred Hutch, where he quickly met a multidisciplinary team of head and neck cancer specialists who would become trusted guides.
Emily Marchiano, MD, a head and neck surgeon at Fred Hutch and UW Medicine, soon discovered that the cancer was inoperable.
“The tumor encased a critical artery in Clifford’s neck, which means that surgery would have carried a very high risk of stroke,” she said. The tumor had also spread to other parts of his body. After a life-threatening reaction to radioactive iodine, a standard treatment for thyroid cancer, Ford was rushed to UW Medical Center – Montlake, where Marchiano performed lifesaving emergency surgery.
Once he was stable, Ford’s care team recommended a new path forward: lenvantanib, a targeted drug that slows cancer growth.
“We never know in advance how effective this drug will be for an individual patient,” said Ford’s medical oncologist, Rafael Santana-Davila, MD, associate professor at Fred Hutch and UW Medicine, “and Mr. Ford’s response was magnificent,” shrinking his tumors dramatically.
In addition to receiving outstanding medical care, said Ford, everyone he met at Fred Hutch — from providers and social workers to schedulers and imaging technicians — treated him with kindness and respect.
“I can’t think of a single, solitary thing that’s happened there that’s even slightly irritated me,” he added. “Dr. Marchiano gave me her phone number and told me it was fine to call her anytime. Dr. Santana is a tell-it-like-it-is guy. We laugh and tell jokes, but he makes sure I understand everything.”
Connection and kismet
For Chenda Grimes, the TCC regional director who oversees the Centralia store where Clifford Ford Jr. entered the Get10Give10 sweepstakes, the personal and professional converged when Ford chose to direct the Give10 portion of his prize to Fred Hutch. The check presentation brought back bittersweet memories of her family’s experience at the only NCI-designated cancer center in Washington state, memories laced with gratitude for the compassionate experts who cared for her father when he was diagnosed with lung cancer.
“Unfortunately, I lost my dad in 2017, [but I know that] this center … truly cares about their patients,” she said. The opportunity to give back through her company’s contest felt like kismet.
“For us to be able to help Fred Hutch continue their research … it’s definitely been a blessing.”
His treatment has been so successful that Ford’s care team has given him a break from active therapy. He still travels to Fred Hutch every three months — two to three hours each way, depending on traffic — for tests and scans, with telehealth visits in between. He will likely need to resume drug treatment in the future, but for now the father of five and grandfather of 11 is living with cancer — and life keeps surprising him.
The cost of daily living didn’t ease up when Ford’s health forced him to stop working. Like most patients with cancer, the financial burden of the disease has been nearly as challenging for him as its physical toll.
The call from LeBlanc changed everything. On February 4, Ford and his family joined TCC leaders to present a $10,000 check to fuel cancer research at Fred Hutch and, to his great surprise, to receive a $10,000 check made out to him personally. And then TCC threw another curveball: Since Ford was the 20th winner of Get10Give10, and his story was so compelling, they doubled his prize and their donation to Fred Hutch, making him their first-ever Get20Give20 winner.
“I’ve never had anything given to me — I’ve had to work hard for it,” Ford said. “You could have knocked me down with a feather when they handed me that check.”
The personal financial boost is life-changing for his family, said Ford. So, too, he added, is the opportunity to give back to Fred Hutch and drive research that will help future patients.
About our Heart of the Hutch series
Much of Fred Hutch’s lifesaving research is possible because of the generosity of its supporters, who continually use their creativity and resourcefulness to raise money for research to prevent and treat cancer and other diseases.
This series highlights just a few of the thousands of Fred Hutch supporters who are the Heart of the Hutch.
Rachel Hart is a writer on the Philanthropy team at Fred Hutch Cancer Center. She has extensive health communications experience, and prior to joining Fred Hutch held staff positions at Boston Children’s Hospital, the New England Journal of Medicine, Seattle Children’s and PATH. Reach her at rhart2@fredhutch.org.
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