Steve Sparks is so grateful to Nemours/Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children in Wilmington that he did two things most 51-year-olds never do –especially in this economy.
First, he organized a one-man bikeathon fundraiser. On Thursday, he will begin pedaling 900 miles from Jacksonville, Florida to Wilmington, Delaware.
[caption id="attachment_11972" align="alignleft" width="144" caption="Katie Sparks, age 2, prior to being diagnosed with leukemia (photo courtesy of the Sparks family)"]
Then, he asked 63 of his friends to contribute $1000 each. He also asked them to reach out to others who would donate $1,000. (More about how that turned out later).
Sparks’ bond with A.I. duPont Hospital began 18 years ago when he was a young successful attorney living in Chadds Ford, PA, with wife Michelle, their three-year-old daughter Katie and their toddler son Kody. When a bruise on the back of Katie’s leg led to a leukemia diagnosis, the Sparks’ priorities shifted. In the next year, the family spent every single holiday at A.I. duPont Hospital as Katie fought fevers and infections.
“The most frightening was when she went code blue,” Sparks vividly recalled. “That was one of the times when they push the parents out of the way and they just deal with the kids.”
Katie left A.I. duPont Hospital healthy in 1996.
[caption id="attachment_11979" align="alignright" width="153" caption="Katie Sparks is now 21, cancer-free and attending UCLA (photo courtesy of Sparks family)"]
Now 21 years old, Katy is a healthy, cancer-free UCLA junior. She’s studying linguistics and hopes to become a speech therapist working with autistic children.
By 2000, Sparks was looking for more personally meaningful employment. Out of the blue, he got a phone call from an old colleague.
“He knew that I was not interested in chasing a dollar bill anymore and I was looking for something with a little more purpose,” Sparks said. “He said the Nemours Foundation was looking to hire its first lawyer. At the time, I didn’t even realize the Nemours Foundation was the A.I. DuPont Hospital. When I found that out, I thought, wow, there’s a reason for this.”
Taking the job meant an immediate 65 percent pay cut. Sparks took it.
Sparks is now General Counsel and Senior Vice President for the Nemours Foundation, the Jacksonville-based parent foundation of A.I. du Pont Hospital. On Thursday, with his wife Michelle driving ahead to check his route, Sparks will hop on an ultra light Cannondale Synapse and bicycle towards Wilmington. The trip marks his daughter’s safe passage through childhood leukemia.
“For me, it’s a personal journey. It really has nothing to do with my employment at Nemours. If I were working for any other company, I think I would still be doing this ride and I think it would still be benefiting Nemours,” Sparks said. “The message I hope my kids get out of this is each of us can make a difference.”
“Steve has done this on his own, just by writing letters. He didn’t want any associates or anyone here to feel that they had to give,” said Nancy Rawdin D’Argenio, public relations specialist at Nemours. “I’m sure that associates would have done that, but that wasn’t his mission.”
Before he even puts his foot on the pedal, Sparks has raised more than $81,000 of his $100,000 goal.
Three-quarters of the friends he initially asked to contribute, did. About a quarter of them found additional $1,000 donors, and many others doubled their own donations.
Sparks started a blog that has developed a readership and attracted donors.
Author and motivational speaker Jon Gordon, a neighbor in Sparks’ Florida community, wrote a story about the fundraiser in Guideposts magazine. Soon after, donations and emails from far-flung corners began flooding in.
“I’ve got a lot of emails from people that start out with, 'You don’t know me, but …' ” Sparks said. “It’s amazing how good people are. You watch television news and you see the bad every day. But the support you get when your kids are sick is amazing, and the support you get for a ride like this is amazing.”
Now Sparks’ attention is shifting to the perils of riding 900 miles on crowded highways.
An avid marathoner and triathlete, Sparks hasn’t completed a week-plus bike ride in thirty years, when he and his brother biked 2,500-miles from Switzerland to Italy. Back then, he wasn’t trying to sandwich the ride into nine-days – and he wasn’t 51.
[caption id="attachment_11991" align="alignleft" width="161" caption="Steve Sparks preparing in Florida for his week-long ride from Jacksonville to Wilmington. (photo courtesy of Sparks family)"]
For the past several weeks, he’s been training on his racing/touring bike around Florida. He’s wondering what will happen when he can’t turn around and head home at night.
“The difference between an 18-year-old body and a 51-year-old body is significant, and I don’t know how my body is going to respond to riding 100-plus miles for nine straight days. I just have to keep telling myself I can do it,” he said.
Spark’s son, Kody, is hoping to join him for the last two legs of the trip, winding up in Wilmington on June 3.
Katie, in the midst of final exams, won’t be biking, but she’ll be tracking her dad’s progress through her mom.
She doesn’t remember much about A.I. duPont Hospital, Katie says, but she recalls her parents relating the buildings on the grounds to the beast’s castle in Beauty and the Beast. “I’m pretty sure this was my parent’s sneaky way of getting a Disney-obsessed 3-year-old to enjoy going to the hospital,” she said.
To donate to the bikeathon, visit Sparks' blog here. All contributions will go to the Hematology/Oncology Division of Nemours.
