110 degrees magazine - Index

110 degrees magazine - magazine - Index

BY BILL BRISTOW I PHOTOS BY RUSSELL BYRNE
I’M BILL
BRISTOW
BILL DESCRIBES THE COURSE OF A LIFE THAT
HAS RAISED HIM FROM HIS HUMBLE ORIGINS AS
THE SON OF A MIGRANT WORKER TO BECOMING
HONORED BY EVERYONE, ADMIRED BY ALL WHO
KNOW HIM PERSONALLY, AND BELOVED BY
THOSE WHO KNOW HIM BEST.
Seventeen years ago, at the age of 55, I was diagnosed with the mycosis fungoides
version of Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma — the cancer that had carried off Jacqueline
Kennedy Onassis following only three months of illness. In my case it took doctors an
entire year simply to make the diagnosis.
I am unwilling to let cancer become the central fact of my life. Fifteen years following
the diagnosis, when I was 69, my wife, Patty, and I took a cruise to Mexico and at
one of the ports we rode horseback through the jungle. Patty watched in horror as my
horse took a backwards s0mersault off the top of a ridge. I did a back flip, somersaulted
down a hill, and rolled right under our guide’s horse, knocking him over so that the
horse landed in a heap right on top of me.
Patty thought I was dead. But I just pushed the animal off me and said, “After fighting
with cancer all these years I’ll be damned if I’m going to die falling off a Mexican
horse.” Doctors applied medicine to my contusions and abrasions, taped up my bruised
bones, and I took Patty dancing that night. At the next port we went riding on ATVs,
which were a marked improvement over those horses.
PREPARING FOR LIFE
Cancer has been just one of the events — although a major one — in an event-filled
life. I was the youngest of eight surviving children born into a family of Okalahoma
sharecroppers. My family was living out the plot to the Grapes of Wrath when we came
to Brentwood in 1936, during the depths of the Great Depression. I was one year old
when we drove across the country in a Model A Ford with us kids piled up in the rumble
seat squatting on top of our belongings.
28 www.110mag.com September/October 2008