No Other Place
Overview
> History
Danny's Story
Hospital Highlights
Volunteering
History
More than 50 years ago, Danny Thomas, then a struggling young entertainer with $7 in his pocket, knelt in a Detroit church before a statue of St. Jude Thaddeus, the patron saint of hopeless causes. Thomas asked the saint to "show me my way in life."
His prayer was answered, and soon he moved his family to Chicago to pursue career offers. A few years later, at another turning point in his life, Thomas again prayed to St. Jude and pledged to someday build a shrine to the saint.
Throughout the next years, Thomas' career prospered through films and television, and he became a nationally known entertainer. He remembered his pledge to build a shrine to St. Jude.
In the early 1950s, Thomas began discussing with friends what concrete form his vow might take. Gradually, the idea of a children's hospital, possibly in Memphis, took shape. In 1955, Thomas and a group of Memphis businessmen who had agreed to help support his dream seized on the idea of creating a unique research hospital devoted to curing catastrophic diseases in children.
Pictured from left to right are Michael F. Tamer, Danny Thomas and Lemuel Diggs.
Thomas had started raising money for his vision of St. Jude in the early 1950s. By 1955, the local business leaders who had joined his cause began area fund-raising efforts, supplementing Thomas' benefit shows that brought scores of major entertainment stars to Memphis. Often accompanied by his wife, Rose Marie, Thomas crisscrossed the United States by car talking about his dream and raising funds at meetings and benefits. The pace was so hectic that Thomas and his wife once visited 28 cities in 32 days. Although Thomas and his friends raised the money to build the hospital, they now faced the daunting task of funding its annual operation.
To solve this problem, Thomas turned to his fellow Americans of Arabic-speaking heritage. Believing deeply that Arabic-speaking Americans should, as a group, thank the United States for the gifts of freedom given their parents, Thomas also felt the support of St. Jude would be a noble way of honoring his immigrant forefathers who had come to America.
