American Magazine March 2015

Len Forkas was determined to connect his sick, homebound
son to his friends and teachers at school. Hundreds of other
children continue to reap the benefits of his resolve.
BY MIKE UNGER
he skinny 22-year-old man with a thick
tuft of brown hair sitting at the kitchen
table and the photo of the bald, sallow
9-year-old boy, his cheeks severely swollen,
share only one obvious similarity.
The same broad smile.
When Len Forkas’s calves were pulsating,
his back tightening, his head pounding, his
lungs gasping for oxygen, he thought often of
both the boy in the photo and the man that
boy has become. But throughout the 3,000-
mile Race across America he completed
in 2012, he also drew inspiration from the
roughly 14,000 other children who, like his
son Matt a decade earlier, are diagnosed with
cancer every year. Len, Kogod/MBA ’89, rode
his Trek Madone 5.9 bike from the Pacific
Ocean to the Chesapeake Bay to raise money
for Hopecam, a charity born from his son’s
battle for life.
On a mild December day that seems too
warm for the wire polar bears and other
holiday decorations on the front lawn of the
family’s Vienna, Virginia, home, father and
son sit next to each another, recounting the
darkest days of their lives and the blessings
those trials ultimately brought.
“Everybody gets tested in their lives,
and it comes in different forms,” Len says.
“The question is, when it happens to you,
what do you do? Fortunately, as a family, we
didn’t look at ourselves as victims. We fought
it. We turned a negative into a positive by
focusing on ways that we could help other
people going through the same thing we
went through.”
Matt is home for winter break from Stetson
University in Florida, where he’s majoring
in business and digital arts. He’s a bit more
laid back than his telecommunications
entrepreneur, marathon-running, bike-racing,
55-year-old father, but the two did team up to
summit Mount Kilimanjaro last summer to
raise $25,000 for Hopecam. Matt bears almost
28 AMERICAN MAGAZINE MARCH 2015