Trevor
Beaty’s favorite Disney character
is Tigger, because “he’s my best friend and he bounces
on his tail.” His favorite song is Johnny Cash’s “Ring
of Fire” and his favorite movie is “Cars.” The 5-year-old from Kennesaw is just like any other kid, except
that he has acute lymphocytic leukemia. Most commonly diagnosed
in children, the disease is a cancer of the blood and bone marrow.
While he can’t cure Trevor’s disease, WWWQ-FM’s
Bert Weiss hopes to make Trevor’s childhood more than a battle
with blood cells and cancer. “The Bert Show” host’s
foundation, Bert’s Big Adventure, kicks off its fifth year
this weekend with a trip to Walt Disney World. The group is providing
an all-expenses paid vacation for 14 metro-area children, ages
5 to 12, who are battling a chronic or terminal illness.
“These kids are fighting a battle with time,” Weiss said. “This
trip is all about these families getting away from the doctors
and the hospitals and making memories. It’s about letting
them just be a family.” The morning-show host got the idea for the program while he worked
with the Dallas-based group Kidd’s Kids. In 1996, the group
took 100 sick children to Walt Disney World, and that trip forever
changed him.
“I decided from that trip that if I ever
had a show of my own, I would do the same type of program for the
kids in that area,” Weiss
said. For these children, the trip won’t be a run-of-the-mill Mickey
Mouse adventure, Weiss said. Instead, the kids will receive celebrity-like
treatment, starting with the red carpet bon voyage reception the
group got when they departed for their four-day adventure, via
Delta Airlines, on Thursday. “The
kids have a plane all to themselves and we pull out all the stops.
This is an over-the-top trip,” Weiss said.
The Bert’s Big Adventure medical committee chose the 14 children
from a list of 120 applicants. They based their decision on medical
conditions and financial needs. Children attending this year’s
trip range in age and background, from a 12-year old girl with
an ovarian germ cell tumor to two sisters, one with brainstem glioma,
the other suffering from cystic fibrosis.
Bert’s Big Adventure is completely funded by “Bert
Show” listeners and others in the community, Weiss said.
For more information, visit www.bertsbigadventure.com.
(This article originally appeared in the Gwinnett
Daily Post on 2/18/2007) |
