Excerpt
from “Kid Number One: A story of heart, soul and business, featuring Alan
Hassenfeld and Hasbro,” the sequel (and prequel) to “Toy Wars: The Epic
Struggle Between G.I. Joe, Barbie, and the Companies That Make Them.” More at KidNumberOne.com and the #KidNumberOne Facebook page. Copyright 2019, G. Wayne Miller.
Focused as they were on business during
Hasbro’s explosive growth during the first half of the eighties – a period when
the Pawtucket firm became the first toy company in history to make the Fortune
500 -- Stephen and Alan Hassenfeld nonetheless found time to begin shaping
their dream of a free-standing children’s hospital in their home state, which
had none, only a cramped, antiquated pediatric wing at Rhode Island Hospital.
“Steve and I talked about it,” Alan recalled. “We
had great pediatric doctors in Rhode Island, but we really didn’t have a
pediatric place to go.”
In this endeavor, as others, Stephen shared his
brother’s, sister’s, and parents’ conviction that Hasbro had a debt to repay.
“We grew up in a family that believed if we had
the capability, we would give back to those who brought about our success and
never forget them,” Alan said. “And also remembering where we came from.
Because too many people that are successful forget where they came from. And
sometimes they even turn their back.”
*****
Seriously sick children from Rhode Island
and southeastern Massachusetts in the 1980s had limited options for advanced
treatment and care, unless they travelled to nationally renowned Boston Children’s
Hospital. Some community hospitals in the region operated pediatric floors or
wings, but they typically were small, antiquated, and unlikely to attract and
retain the finest clinicians and researchers. Even Rhode Island Hospital, the
state’s largest medical center and a leader in many medical and surgical
fields, did not emphasize pediatric healthcare.
The
regional status quo was captured in a newspaper story published in September
1991.
“Thursday’s
dawn is approaching, and Room 12 in Rhode Island Hospital's children's wing is
a sleeping column of bodies big and small,” the story began.
“In
the bed nearest the window, a 2-year-old nestles against her mother. A
1-year-old is in the crib next to them, the child's father scrunched up in a
nearby chair because there is no room for a cot. In the third bed, Gary
Christopher rouses himself to check on 4-year-old Justin, who sleeps peacefully
at his side. The bathroom is down the hall and must be shared by up to 25
children. At night, the warning sounds of one person's intravenous pump can
wake everyone up.
“‘This,’ jokes Christopher, ‘is the lousiest hotel
I've ever stayed in.’”
It
wasn’t a joke for the 4,300 children hospitalized there annually.
The
Potter building had opened on the eve of World War II, during an era when
staffs at most hospitals discouraged parents from visiting their sick children
except briefly; parents, the thinking went, got in the way. And they certainly
did not belong there overnight. The original visiting hours at Potter were one
hour, twice a week, which was eventually replaced with a 2 p.m.-to-4 p.m. daily
schedule. Fathers were allowed from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m., provided they had secured
special permission. The fact that the comfort of a mother or father (or both)
can promote healing was slow to arrive.
But it
did arrive, helped by such healers as Dr. Edwin N. Forman, associate chief of
pediatrics at Rhode Island Hospital in 1991. “I remember when I was in the
hospital, I could never stop crying,” he said. “The old idea was that you [the
parent] are totally incompetent from helping or protecting your child from
illness.”
Slowly,
the old rules changed, and parents were allowed to sleep overnight—in quarters
as tight as an overcrowded prison cell, as one newspaper story described
it.
“Right
now, parents sleep underneath beds or in chairs. One room has six beds,” Forman
said. “But parents make sure children eat better; they protect their children
from falling out of bed and getting the wrong medications, and the parent feels
competent.”
Said the
father of a boy who spent the night in a small bedside chair and sang his son
back to sleep whenever he was wakened: “It makes a difference. The nurses are
not going to stay and make sure he goes back to sleep.”
In
other words, parents were partners, integral members of the healthcare team,
not to mention they were the people who knew their children best.
*****
When Stephen and Alan Hassenfeld first
envisioned a children’s hospital in Rhode Island, Forman was one of the first
medical professionals to join the discussion. He was a pioneering pediatric
oncologist and hematologist known not only for his expertise but his kindly
manner and first-hand knowledge of the inadequacies of pediatric care at the
hospital where he worked. A native of Brooklyn, he had graduated from Brown
University, completed medical school at the University of Pennsylvania, and
then completed a residency in pediatrics at Johns Hopkins University.
Parents
and children thought the world of Forman, even after he had delivered diagnoses
of life-threatening illnesses. He listened. He was kind. He cared.
Those
qualities were described in a newspaper story in 2005 marking the 20th
anniversary of the Tomorrow Fund, a non-profit organization modeled after
Boston’s Jimmy Fund that provides emotional and financial assistance to
families with children who have cancer. Forman was a co-founder. In the story,
one boy’s mother recalled the day Forman delivered the news that her son had
leukemia:
“He
was calm and comforting—grandfatherly—very reassuring. You're talking about
your three-year-old, who could possibly die, and this man comes in and gives
you the strength and the confidence in him to know that he's going to do
everything he has in his power to make it better… He’s just an amazing
individual who really cares and really knows his job and mission—to help save
children's lives.”
Forman
helped the three-year-old. Five years later, the boy was cancer-free.
In
1989, four years after the Tomorrow Fund debuted, Forman co-founded a
Providence Ronald McDonald House, which offered low-cost housing for families
whose children were hospitalized. And then he set his sights on a modern,
free-standing hospital. His efforts received a major boost when he asked the
Joint Commission for the Accreditation of Health Care Organizations to review
the Potter unit and the commission concluded:
“Your
children's area is an embarrassment.”
The
Hassenfelds agreed. The campaign for something better was on.
*****
It advanced when another doctor of stature,
William Oh, professor and chairman of the Brown University School of Medicine’s
Department of Pediatrics and a pediatrician at Women & Infants Hospital,
signed on shortly after Stephen’s death from AIDS in June 1989.
Oh was
one of the 11 children of Chinese parents who emigrated to the Philippines,
where they operated a small store that provided enough income to support their
family and their children’s education, which they prized.
“They
made a living out of this little grocery store, but they put everything in our
education. All of us went to colleges and were all successful, so we’re very
grateful to them,” Oh told an interviewer with the American Academy of
Pediatrics, which interviewed Oh at his home in Rhode Island in 2008 for its
Oral History Project. One of Oh’s siblings also became a medical doctor, two
earned doctoral degrees in engineering and became executives with General
Motors, two became teachers, and another became a successful businesswoman who
owned a Philippines shipping company and an import/export firm.
Oh told
of his childhood during World War II, when the Japanese occupied his native
country. Shades of Henry and Hillel Hassenfeld, in their place of birth: a part
of Eastern Europe where in 1903 white supremacists were slaughtering Jews.
Henry, Alan’s grandfather, and Hillel, his great-uncle, founded Hasbro after
fleeing that persecution in 1903. They were penniless teenage refugees who
spoke no English when they arrived in America and began peddling rags – the
start of what literally would be Hasbro’s rags-to-riches story.
“My
dad was a member of an anti-Japanese committee, so when the Japanese soldiers
invaded the Philippines and took over this town, they were looking for my dad, because
he was considered a spy,” Oh recalled. “They really wanted to get him and,
essentially, execute him. In fact, there were five members in that committee.
Three of them were executed. My father was a lucky one. The whole family moved
to a mountainside.”
There,
they planted rice and corn and kept a small chicken farm and were so poor that
the children went barefoot, shoes being beyond financial reach. Oh joked—but it
was true—that walking three years without shoes caused his feet to widen. As an
adult, he wore triple- or quadruple-E shoes, the only size that fit.
Until
the war ended, the Oh family lived in fear. Once a week, usually on a Monday or
Tuesday, Oh recalled, Japanese soldiers patrolled the mountain area, searching
for the two remaining men who had publicly opposed Japan.
“We
had some sentinels out there, so when they saw the Japanese patrol coming by,
they would run and warn everybody that the Japanese were coming,” Oh recalled.
“So we would pack up and hide in the river in the back of the mountainside
town. The whole family would move into the riverside to hide from them, but
they only patrolled on the highway. I still remember that every one of us had a
responsibility. I remember my responsibility was to carry a bag of rice and a
bag of clothing that I owned. Everyone was prepared. So whenever the sentinel
came and said, ‘The Japanese are coming,’ we would each pack up our things and
run until the sentinel come back and said, ‘They’re all gone.’ Then we could
come back and stay in the house.
“So it
was a very interesting experience. The kind of experience that actually built
your character, because you learned to be organized, you learned to be alert,
and you learned to take care of each other. It really was a character-builder,
those three years. I was very, in a way, fortunate to have that kind of
experience.”
Tikkun
Olam, the Jewish tradition of “repairing the world” -- helping others -- that
the Hassenfeld family has practiced for more than a century.
After
the war, Oh attended an American Jesuit-run high school and then a junior
college run by the order. His mentor, a Jesuit from Wisconsin, so impressed him
that he wanted to become a priest. Shocked and saddened, his Buddhist mother
cried for three nights and days, Oh remembered. “You’re not going to be a
priest,” she said. “I want a grandson from you.”
“I was
number six in the family, but I followed three girls,” Oh said. “You know how
Chinese are. They’re very pro-male, so I was the first boy after the three
girls. I was very close to her heart, I think. So anyway, I couldn’t take it. I
couldn’t let my mom down. So I went back to Father Masterson, and I said,
‘Father, I can’t do this. I can’t let my mom down like that.’
“And
he was very understanding. He used to call me William, not Bill, and he said,
‘Well, William, if you cannot save souls, you might as well save bodies.’ He
was encouraging me to go into medicine, and so I did.”
*****
Recruited by Dr. Leo Stern, head of
pediatrics at Rhode Island Hospital and Women & Infants Hospital and
professor at Brown University’s new medical school, Oh arrived in the Ocean
State in 1974. He had no intention of taking Stern’s job.
But
then, 15 years later, in 1989, Stern lost his life to suicide by jumping off
the tenth-story roof of Rhode Island Hospital’s main building.
“Every
time I talk about it, I still get chest pain,” Oh told the American Academy of
Pediatrics. “The whole department was in tears. Everybody knew within 24 hours,
around the country, that this bad news occurred.”
Rhode
Island Hospital president Louis A. Fazzano believed the suicide would make it
difficult, if not impossible, to find an outsider to replace Stern. So he asked
Oh, who said he would consider the offer over the weekend.
If I don’t do it, this department probably
will not survive, because the news is so bad, Oh thought. And the
underlying news was terrible, too, he later recalled: “One of the reasons that
Leo was in crisis was that the budget was something like $1 million in the red.
In those days, the budget only involved $4 or 5 million. Apparently, they
wanted him to fire his faculty members, and he refused to do it. He’s very
loyal. He was loyal to his faculty.”
Fazzano’s
offer stood. When Monday came, Oh told him: “I’ll do it.”
“What
do you need?” Fazzano said.
“You
know, Lou, you know what I need?” Oh said. “We need a new hospital.”
“You’re
asking me to write a $50 million check for you?” Fazzano said.
“You’re
damn right,” Oh said. “But you will get it all back in due time. To build a new
program, you need a facility. It’s like to catch mice, you need to get a good
mousetrap to attract all these people to come here.”
“I
will chair the fund-raising committee,” Fazzano said.
The
hospital president went to Hasbro CEO Alan Hassenfeld, who already was
discussing possibilities with Forman, fellow Hasbro executives Al Verrecchia
and Wayne Charness, and others.
“Everybody
believed in the hospital,” Hassenfeld later said.
His
belief had solidified during a tour of Potter. Charness, who accompanied him on
the tour, recalled seeing “a kid in a supply closet getting a chemotherapy
drip.” A supply closet was the only available space.
“Alan
saw that and I swear he was crying,” Charness recalled. “He said, ‘we’ve got to
do this.’ That’s when we went back and committed to five million dollars, of
which we would give $2.5 million and we would help them raise another $2.5
million. Al and Alan were both very
active [in raising the second $2.5 million] —Al especially, in going to
all of our vendors around the world, Asia, the U.S., everywhere, to help raise
this money. It was incredible.”
In
years to come, Verrecchia would chair the board of directors of Lifespan, the
parent system of Hasbro Children’s Hospital, Rhode Island Hospital, and Bradley
Hospital, the nation’s first neuropsychiatric hospital for children and
adolescents; he also would serve as president of the Rhode Island Public
Expenditure Council, and on the boards of the Wheeler School and The Wolf
School, among other positions. Charness would be vice-chair of the Hasbro
Children’s Hospital Advisory Council; become president of the Rhode Island
Community Food Bank and Adoption Rhode Island; and serve on the boards of
environmental group Save the Bay, adoption group Families First, and Give Kids
The World Village, a nonprofit resort in Florida that provides free vacations
to children with life-threatening illnesses and their families.
And
Alan Hassenfeld’s philanthropic commitments would broaden.
*****
On September 19, 1991, Hassenfeld welcomed the
community to a celebration that had been orchestrated by Charness in
collaboration with Verrecchia and others. Under big-top tents made festive with
balloons, guests enjoyed popcorn and soft drinks. Miss America 1991, Marjorie
Vincent, daughter of Haitian immigrants, graced the crowd with her presence.
Officials
were breaking ground for Hasbro Children’s Hospital.
Scheduled
to open in 1994, the $51.5-million hospital would have 87 private rooms, each with
a bed for a patient and another for a parent, and a bathroom with shower. It
would have a pediatric emergency department, four pediatric operating rooms, a
four-bed bone-marrow transplantation unit, play and consultation areas, a gift
shop, a chapel, an outdoor garden, and a library, a lobby, and a fountain.
Every patient floor would have three circular nurses’ stations, with eight
rooms surrounding each. A child would always be able to see a nurse and a nurse
would always be able to observe a child.
This
would be no Potter Unit makeover. Bruce K. Komiske, the new hospital’s vice
president for planning, marketing, and business development, was clear about
that.
“Kids
are not little adults,” he said, and they required their own facility. Parents
would be welcomed when Hasbro Children’s opened. They already were, having been
involved in design decisions that had “a big impact on the layout of the room,
the size of the rooms, how the bathrooms work and the types of furnishings,”
Komiske said.
“It
will welcome children in a very specific way, trying to provide as much
familiarity to them as possible so it will be less frightening,” said Eleanor
Elbaum, director of pediatric patient services.
Essential
to “developing a world-class children's hospital,” said president William
Kreykes.
Hassenfeld
explained to a reporter the reasoning behind his decision to name the hospital
after his company, not his family. “This is for all the people who work in a
business that is like a family,” he said. “Too many times, we get the credit
for what our people have done.”
“The
hospital that toys will build: Work begins on children’s unit given by
Hasbro,” read the headline on the front-page Providence Journal story
the day after the groundbreaking. Hasbro had donated its $2.5 million to the
project, Verrecchia was securing the other $2.5 million from Hasbro vendors,
and Hassenfeld had agreed to take a lead role in the community campaign to
raise some $20 million more.
The
campaign was quickly successful: Within a year, three-quarters of the
$20-million goal had been achieved. A progress report in the fall of 1992, when
construction of the building was about half-finished, revealed some of the
major contributors solicited by Hassenfeld, Verrecchia, and hospital officials.
Fleet Financial Group (a progenitor of Bank of America) gave $500,000 for the
pediatric emergency room and another $500,000 to Brown University’s medical
school to endow a professorship dedicated to researching how social problems
affect children’s health. The Champlin Foundation contributed $1.5 million, The
Providence Journal Co., $400,000, and Hospital Trust National Bank, $250,000.
More than $1 million was donated by hospital employees.
Ironically,
the old children’s unit had become a powerful force for good.
Oh was
delighted by the new Brown professorship, the “Fleet Scholar for the Study of
Social Pediatrics.”
“It
will tie in very nicely with our research,” the pediatrician said.
Seven months later, in May 1993, the capital
campaign reached its $20-million goal—a year ahead of
schedule. The total donated by hospital employees, trustees and volunteers had
reached $7.5 million, and the Kresge Foundation had added an $800,000 challenge
grant.
“The campaign is exceeding everybody's
expectations,” Kreykes said.
So the campaign leaders decided to go for more—$3
million more in donations, to be used for a pediatric out-patient clinic on the
hospital’s lower level. The original plans had envisioned that center being
outfitted at some future date but completing it with the rest of the hospital
was now feasible.
Hassenfeld continued to invest his time in
raising money, succeeding with donations totaling another $1.5 million from
domestic and overseas business associates; with his extensive connections to
vendors and others in the Hasbro production chain, Verrecchia joined that
effort.
“I basically committed to a gift—and
committed to match that gift in raising funds—with a handshake,” Hassenfeld told a woman who was writing
a construction-progress report. “It was a bond of honor,” one that his
executives and employees shared.
Hassenfeld also was investing his time in
design decisions that would set the atmosphere he and others wanted to be as
comfortable as possible.
“What you wanted to do is make it
nonthreatening,” he told the woman writing the progress report. “You wanted to
make it almost fun… It’s a lot of the soft things and fuzzy things that we’ve
really had an impact on. From the day that we agreed to be
the foundation in the building of the hospital, if this hospital was going to
carry our name, we just wanted to be involved.”
Hassenfeld intentionally gave no say in
medical-design decisions, but décor was an area in which he could legitimately
make suggestions. No fan of the wall clocks that the designers had selected for
the nurses’ stations—Hassenfeld judged them too close to ones on
school walls—so on his recommendation, can’t they be more fun?, a cartoonist
dressed them up.
Looking to the bigger picture, Hassenfeld
disliked the original plans for the color palette, judging them unsuitable for
a place where sick children needed cheer and parents wanted reassurance. He
judged them “awful” —a description shared by his wife, Vivien,
whose style sense was keen—and so he brought in
Deborah Sussman, an award-winning designer whose touch had been put on the 1984
Summer Olympics, among many other projects.
“Surprising combinations” characterized the
scheme Sussman created for the hospital, the writer of the progress report
stated. “The lobby columns, instead of the bright cherry originally proposed,
are muted salmon and aqua. Everywhere, the primary colors that children crave
interact with the restful pastels that adults require.”
Hassenfeld was self-effacing when describing
his company’s support.
“It’s only in soft and fuzzy terms that
Hassenfeld will speak of his contribution,” the writer stated. “Asked what
Hasbro gains from its donation, he says, ‘Tears of joy.’ Pressed for a
businessman's response, he still doesn't say it's good advertising. He says the
hospital will make Hasbro employees proud.”
*****
A community
had come together. Perhaps the only naysay had been raised when Hassenfeld
encountered Providence Mayor Vincent A. “Buddy” Cianci Jr. one day before the
new hospital was completed while dining at the Capital Grille, a popular
restaurant for politicians and power brokers near the State House.
The mayor said: “Alan? I got a problem.”
“Whatcha got?” Hassenfeld said.
“You know there are air rights with the bridge
between the two hospitals,” Cianci said. The structure would connect Hasbro
Children’s to Rhode Island Hospital.
Hassenfeld wasn’t sure what he meant, but a smart
guess would have been that the mayor did not like being overshadowed by someone
bigger than himself.
“You’re going to have to pay for the air rights
and that hasn’t been negotiated,” Cianci said.
Hassenfeld couldn’t tell if he was kidding or not.
“Buddy,” he said, “I’m raising money to build a
children’s hospital, what the hell do I know about air rights? That’s for you
to negotiate with others.”
The mayor seemed unsatisfied with the answer.
“Buddy, I promise you one thing,” Hassenfeld said.
“I went to university at a time when we were fairly creative in protests and
demonstrations sit-ins. I don’t think your honor would like a sit-in outside
City Hall—with children with IVs. Buddy, drop it.”
The mayor did.
*****
As the opening of Hasbro Children’s Hospital approached, the
capital campaign surpassed $23 million in contributions. They came in gifts of
hundreds of thousands of dollars and gifts of dimes. Literally, dimes: from the
“Dimes for Deeds” campaign conducted in public schools through Rhode Island,
from sales of chocolate lollipops at shopping centers, from a month’s worth of
proceeds from a carousel at a mall. Nurses wrote and published a cookbook and
raised money selling it. Providence College’s nationally ranked men’s
basketball team donated $50 for each three-point basket during one stretch of a
season.
The spirit of giving rippled through the
community.
One fund-raising team sold Hasbro toys,
working with the Rhode Island National Guard and visiting Rotary and Kiwanis
Clubs, “any nook and cranny of the community where they could find interest,”
said vice president for public relations and development Slone. Artists donated
hundreds of their works to the new building and painted murals on walls. A
marina donated a 35-foot sailboat and a fire department gave, in memory of a
boy who had died of cancer, an antique fire engine for the hospital’s outside
play yard.
In no better fashion, perhaps, was the spirit
better exemplified than with the approximately 10,000 six-inch-square ceramic
tiles that patients, parents, and students from all of Rhode Island’s 39 cities
and towns produced as part of the Circle of Clay project.
Overseen by stained-glass artist Peter
Geisser, art director at the Rhode Island School for the Deaf and underwritten
with more than $100,000 raised by Very Special Arts Rhode Island, devoted to
involving people with disabilities in the arts, the Circle featured depictions
of people, animals, dinosaurs, and even a pizza. Most told stories of joy, but
a few spoke of death, the closing chapter for some seriously sick children. The
choice was left to the tiles’ creators.
One was made by a girl who was unlikely to
survive.
“A hush fell over the intensive-care unit,”
said nurse Maureen Oberg. “Just incredible, as the mother did the little girl’s
handprint."
“You're looking at a house and tree,"
said Geisser, “then you encounter somebody saying goodbye to their dying
child.”
Major gifts had continued, with the charitable
trust division of defense giant Textron, headquartered in Providence, giving a
quarter of a million dollars, and The Rhode Island Hospital Surgery Foundation,
the Haffenreffer Family Fund, and the Rhode Island Foundation each also giving
$250,000. Providence Anesthesiologists and University Orthopedics each gave
$350,000. Four-hundred-thousand dollars came from The Herald Group of Hong
Kong, established by another friend of Hassenfeld and Verrecchia: the
Austrian-born, British-educated George Bloch, who began building a toy and
housewares manufacturing company after moving to Shanghai on the eve of World
War II. Rhode Island Medical Imaging
donated $1 million.
And this generosity blossomed during a time
when the country was slowly recovering from a recession, which hit Rhode Island
particularly hard.
“We’ve seldom had this experience of
generosity, especially in such tough economic times,” said Slone.
*****
When the final coat of paint had dried, patients on the morning of
February 12, 1994, were moved from Potter through Rhode Island Hospital’s
corridors and elevators to Hasbro Children’s Hospital in an intricately
choreographed transition, eight months in the planning. The opening followed a
major snowstorm, but weather proved but a minor inconvenience to what was
described as a procession of 60 patients in wheelchairs and on stretchers,
assisted by hundreds of staff, parents, and volunteers. Reporters recorded the
event. Musicians played and a nun distributed teddy bears to patients.
“It’s
very exciting,” pediatric cardiologist Dr. Lloyd Feit said on that day. “It’s
finally happening. It’s reality.”
Minutes before 7:30 a.m., Barbara Crosby, a nurse
on Potter since the early 1980s, began moving the crib where two-year-old
Caitlyn Adler was awaiting surgery. Accompanied by her mother, Eileen Adler,
the girl was wheeled from Potter to the passageway from Rhode Island Hospital
to Hasbro Children’s. A red ribbon and a crowd of officials and journalists
awaited.
“Eileen Adler picks up her daughter and cuts
the ribbon,” The Providence Journal
wrote. “Caitlyn sort of smiles. Her hand is taped to a board to keep the
intravenous line in place. Caitlyn has a brain tumor that doctors hope to
remove this week.”
Caitlyn was settled into her new room, painted
in pink, with a floor-to-ceiling window and a border of swimming fish.
“It's beautiful,” Eileen Adler said. “It’s
cheery and bright. It feels nice and clean.”
“It was like going from Kansas into Oz,” a
nurse recalled decades later, on the 20th anniversary of the opening. “Like
walking into Cinderella’s castle,” another staff member remembered.
Hassenfeld, Verrecchia, and Charness were
in New York for Toy Fair during that second week of February 1994, but they
visited the hospital following their return. Hassenfeld, in another event
marking the opening of the hospital, struck a favorite theme.
“From
the Wizard of Oz, Dorothy sings, ‘Somewhere over the rainbow, skies are blue…
and the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true,’” he said.
“Today,
the dream that we dared to dream really does become reality. For almost 72
years, we have flourished in this community—from my grandfather to my father to
my brother Stephen—three generations of Hassenfelds. They built Hasbro with a
heart and always with a tradition of giving back. Today, I really represent the
four generations of Hasbro employees, those who rise at 4 a.m. to work on the
assembly lines, those in the community, and those across the seven seas. To so
many of those who have dedicated their lives to Hasbro in Rhode Island, I can
only say ‘thank you.’
“So
often, the landscape of our Rhode Island is painted as being negative and
bleak,” Hassenfeld continued, in reference to corrupt politics that he, as
leader of an ethics-reform group, sought to defeat. “May this children’s
hospital be the beacon of light that shows the world we truly can be the best…
From construction workers to nurses—from doctors to architects—from parents to
the community as a whole—from Rhode Island artists to caring givers—we have
shown that people can work hand in hand, without egos. What we have
accomplished is truly monumental.”
Hassenfeld
paused in memory of a boy sick with cancer who had shared the spotlight three
years before, when construction of the hospital had begun.
“Oh,
how I wish I could wave a magical wand and bring Robert Eckert back,”
Hassenfeld said. “Robert held my hand as we walked to break ground in September
‘91. Robert died shortly after. It is
not fair. How I wish there would be a way to alleviate all pain and sorrow. For
the future, that must be another dream. For now, all we can do is ease the
furrow on a brow—bring warmth, tenderness and a smile to a cloudy countenance.”
Hassenfeld
said the new hospital would be “a magical, non-threatening, enchanting home
with the best doctors and nurses in the land,” and then he quoted the lyrics
from the Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie tune, “We are the World,” recorded
for the USA for Africa fundraiser: There
comes a time when we need a certain call, when the world must come together as
one. There are children dying and it’s time to lend a hand to life, the
greatest gift of all.
Turning
emotional, Hassenfeld looked to another country he knew well.
“The
Chinese believe that when one is married, it is best to have rain, for it is a
sign of good luck. Confucius had not yet figured out snow, but let us say it is
white rain, the purest and best of good fortune, as we unite tonight to bring
our children a better tomorrow. I tremble and my eyes have tears of joy. A
beacon of hope and a dream are becoming a reality because of all here, and so
many others who are not, who have joined hands and heart to protect our
greatest natural resource, our children.”
*****
Months later, on December 20, 1994, at the first of what became an
annual tradition that they continued after both had left the Hasbro executive
suite, Hassenfeld and Verrecchia, accompanied by Charness, visited the
hospital. It was five days before Christmas.
Hassenfeld beamed, despite just learning that
the Mexican peso had been devalued, bringing his Mexican business to
near-devastation.
“This puts it all in perspective,” he said as
he followed gurneys loaded with toys into an elevator.
“Merry Christmas everyone!” he said at the
first stop, the intensive-care unit.
“Is that Mister Hasbro?” whispered a nurse.
On Hassenfeld went, through a visit that
lasted three hours.
“This is my favorite teddy bear,” he told a
boy with cancer. “He's going to keep you company.”
But another child wanted no teddy bear,
Transformer, Battleship game or anything other Hasbro toy on the gurneys—he
wanted a Power Ranger.
“Mighty Morphin Power Ranger—this
is hurting me!” Hassenfeld laughed.
But he promised to get him one.
“Aren't you nice,” a mother said. “May I ask
who you are?”
“We work at Hasbro,” Hassenfeld said, letting
it go at that.
In deciding to play Santa, he’d forbidden
outside press coverage or internal announcement, except to the administrators
who had to be informed.
This was not about him, nor even his company.
*****
Excerpt from “Kid Number One: A story of heart, soul and business, featuring Alan Hassenfeld and Hasbro,” the sequel (and prequel) to “Toy Wars: The Epic Struggle Between G.I. Joe, Barbie, and the Companies That Make Them.” More at KidNumberOne.com and the #KidNumberOne Facebook page. Copyright 2019, G. Wayne Miller.
