A Cancer Challenged : Former UCI Chancellor Looks Ahead to Senior Olympics

There’s a 60-year-old Finnish athlete named Jobbila who has the distinction of being the only senior citizen in the world to beat Daniel G. Aldrich Jr. in the discus throw. But Jobbila doesn’t get the chance very often because he’s nine years younger than Aldrich and thus competes in Dan’s age division just once each decade.

“He really trimmed me in ‘78,” recalls Aldrich admiringly, “but I’m looking forward to another shot at him.”

He’ll get it the first week in December, when he and Jobbila go head-to-head at the Senior Olympics in Melbourne, Australia. What Jobbila doesn’t know--and probably won’t find out unless he asks about the small bulge under Dan’s shirt--is that the former UC Irvine chancellor will be competing while undergoing treatment for cancer. The bulge is a pump that is dripping medication into his system 24 hours a day.

Someday, the pharmaceutical industry will wise up and bottle Aldrich. Essence of Aldrich would sell like gangbusters--as long as it was combined with heavy doses of courage, impatience, determination, optimism, and a life style so unflaggingly healthy that whatever things cause cancer must have been taken aback when they moved in on him.

He was operated on May 13 in Santa Barbara for colon cancer. After his colon was removed, it was discovered that it had spread to his liver and that further treatment would be needed. In June, he was equipped with his pump. Two weeks later, he was on a golf course. And five months later, he is competing in the discus, shot put and hammer throw in the Senior Olympics.

People who know Aldrich aren’t terribly surprised. “The biggest concession I’ve made to this,” he says, frowning slightly at the invasion, “is that now I have to do things normally instead of attacking them.”

He has found that approach has some advantages. He may be the only patient ever to make the medical textbooks because a treatment for cancer also cured his slice on the golf course. He explains it this way:

“I’ve got a catheter in here.” He taps his chest. “They were going to put it on the upper right side of my chest, but I asked them to put it on the left side so it wouldn’t restrict my arm movement when I’m throwing the discus. But it had another effect I didn’t expect. It constrains my movement on the other side enough that I have to make an almost perfect follow-through. I’d never mastered that on a golf course. I just attacked the ball and almost always sliced it. Now I hit it straight down the middle.”

Aldrich was the first chancellor--and for 22 years before his retirement in 1984 the only one--at UCI. He was and still is an international expert in his chosen field of agriculture. (Last week, in the cubbyhole office he maintains at UCI, he was putting the finishing touches on a study--done under the auspices of the National Academy of Science--on the role of agriculture in U.S. society.)

Aldrich steered the Irvine campus expertly through the shoals of puberty and the Vietnam War rumbles, somehow maintaining credibility with both ends of the political spectrum--a perilous balancing act in the Orange County of the 1960s.

In its early years, the university was looked upon with deep suspicion for its threatened infusion of liberals into the ultraconservative climate of the county. Aldrich, with his agricultural background, athletic prowess and straight-on delivery, was the ideal administrator to bridge this gap.

A few years later, he had to protect UCI’s new credibility from the attacks of leftist students without sacrificing hard-won academic freedoms. He achieved both with the kind of dominating presence that now is staring down cancer.

He quelled one of the worst riots of the Vietnam period simply by showing up. He stood on a balcony above a chaotic scene on the UCI Commons and began to talk. It is doubtful whether anyone heard what he was saying, but his presence began to affect the crowd. Slowly the chaos dissipated, and the rioters began to drift off. Before he finished talking, the scene was quiet.

Without question, a large part of this presence is physical. Aldrich is a tall (6 feet, 4 inches), powerful man with massive hands and shoulders like the wingspan of a jet fighter. Although cancer has taken some toll, the changes were barely perceptible five months after his surgery. A tiny slope to the shoulders, a small weight loss, slightly discolored hands.

Until his surgery, retirement to Aldrich had simply meant a more varied menu of frenetic activity. In between racing about the world on international agricultural missions, he became the university’s official surrogate chancellor, filling in at both the Riverside and Santa Barbara campuses when the chancellor’s posts were vacated rather suddenly.

He was just a month away from wrapping up his trouble-shooting at Santa Barbara when he returned from Mexico, Costa Rica and Washington, D.C., to the Laguna Niguel home he and his wife, Jean, have maintained throughout his post-retirement travels. (Two of his three children and five of his grandchildren live nearby; his youngest son and two other grandchildren live in Texas.)

“The yard needed care,” he recalls, “and we spent most of the weekend working in it. The second night I was home, I felt uncomfortable and got up in the middle of the night to find I was bleeding. I went back to bed, but when the hemorrhaging didn’t stop, I told Jean to call the doctor I worked with in Santa Barbara and ask him to meet us at the hospital emergency room.

“When I got out of bed, I was dizzy--and I’ve never been dizzy or weak in my whole life. At the hospital, I was determined to walk in, and I did. Then I sort of collapsed in the emergency waiting room.”

His colon was removed the next day, and the spread of the cancer was discovered. It was decided that he would return home, to the care of his UCI physician, Dr. Steven Armentrout, before he could decide on the nature of further treatment.

“There are only three ways to go,” says Aldrich matter-of-factly, “more surgery, chemotherapy or radiation. We decided on a relatively new technique that avoids periodic powerful chemotherapy treatments by what they call continuous infusion. I have to wear this battery-operated box that drips medication into my system all the time.”

When Aldrich started wearing his “box,” it was uncertain what the side effects would be or how long he could tolerate it.

“The longest up to that time was five weeks,” he says proudly. “I went 6 1/2 the first time.”

In Aldrich’s case, the side effects are a highly sun-sensitive skin (“I worked in the garden the first day after I got the box, and the sun fried me”), an ache in his throat that tells him it’s time to rest, painful sensitivity in his hands and the balls of his feet, and, finally, rather severe diarrhea. When the pump is removed, the side effects disappear in the order in which they came.

Although Aldrich has learned to moderate the side effects by tempering his activities (“I only play mixed doubles instead of singles in tennis when I’m wearing the pump”), the doctors have put him on a four-weeks-on/two-weeks-off medication schedule. He’ll be wearing his box when he competes in the discus.

On this day, even though it is raining, he heads for the UCI athletic field for his daily workout, absently picking up stray bits of paper from the ground en route to his car. (His morning walk in Santa Barbara with his wife became so notorious for this activity that the entire campus cleanup detail once waited outside for him at 6 a.m. to go along. “I shaped them up,” he recalls with satisfaction.)

At the field, he heaves one prodigious shot put that measures 47 feet--two feet longer than his previous best. “I don’t want to peak too early,” he says, and moves to the discus, where he spends more time retrieving than throwing it. To the suggestion that he find someone to retrieve it for him, he says firmly: “I don’t want anybody shagging for me. I need all the exercise I can get.”

Do his doctors approve of all this activity?

“Well,” Aldrich says, “when I started to train, I told them: ‘Now we’ll find out whether you guys know as much about this as you think you do.’ So far, it’s worked out fine.”

Watching and listening to Aldrich, it’s difficult to foresee any other outcome. When he is asked if the goal of the treatment is remission or elimination of the cancer, he answers emphatically, “Elimination.”

That’s why he’s making plans--just in case Jobbila beats him in Melbourne--to go after the Finn again in 1998. After all, Jobbila will be almost 70 then.