Show notes
Ep. 20 — A police officer is brought back to life after a near-fatal motorcycle crash and takes on a profound new mission / Frank Shankwitz, Creator and a Co-Founder, Make-A-Wish Foundation.
Arizona Highway Patrol Officer Frank Shankwitz was chasing after a drunk driver one day at 85 miles an hour when his motorcycle broadsided a second drunk driver who cut in front of him.
His partner could not revive Shankwitz who had suffered grievous injuries and reported him dead at the scene.
But an off-duty emergency room nurse driving past the crash performed CPR for four minutes and literally brought Shankwitz back to life.
Recovering slowly from his injuries, Shankwitz didn’t fully realize the implications of getting a reprieve from death until his counselor urged him to find deeper meaning.
Two years later, when he was asked to cheer up a terminally ill seven-year-old boy who was a huge fan of highway motorcycle squads because of the popular television show CHiPS, Shankwitz found that higher cause.
The result was the Make-A-Wish Foundation, which today, forty years after Shankwitz created and co-founded it, has granted more than half a million wishes of children with life-threatening illnesses.
After having lived a childhood filled with homelessness and poverty, Shankwitz has created a life for himself that’s rich in meaning by giving sick children around the world a wealth of happiness from their dreams coming true.
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Chitra Ragavan: Hello, everyone. I'm Chitra Ragavan, and this is When It Mattered. When It Mattered is a podcast on how leaders deal with and learn from adversity. This episode is brought to you by Goodstory, an advisory firm helping technology startups find their narrative. My guest today is Frank Shankwitz, the creator and a co-founder of the Make-A-Wish Foundation, a global charity that fulfills the wishes of children with life-threatening illnesses.
Chitra Ragavan: Shankwitz has taken the lessons learned from his early years of extreme poverty and homelessness and has spent most of his adult life giving back. A US Air Force veteran, Shankwitz served as an Arizona Highway Patrol motorcycle officer and a homicide detective with the Arizona Department of Public Safety. Retiring after 42 years on the force, Shankwitz has received many awards for his work with the Make-A-Wish Foundation, the White House Call to Service award from both President George W. Bush and president Donald J. Trump, and the Making A Difference in The World award from the US Military Academy at West Point, just to name a few.
Chitra Ragavan: Mr. Shankwitz, welcome to the podcast.
Frank Shankwitz: Thank you. I appreciate the invitation.
Chitra Ragavan: Your early years, as I said, were filled with poverty and homelessness and separation from one or other parent. Could you describe what those early years were like?
Frank Shankwitz: Interesting, I never thought they were that bad, but Hollywood made a movie about it, so I guess they were. I was born in Chicago, and, at two years old, my mother divorced my father and left. We never knew where, had no idea where she went. In later years, I figured out, because she would never tell me, that she went to Arizona. Ages two to five were just very happy years living with my grandparents, while my dad worked down on weekends, aunts, uncles, cousins, just a lot of fun times.
Frank Shankwitz: At five years old, I was in kindergarten on a playground, and a lady grabbed me, dragged me, and she said, "I'm your mother," I have no idea who this lady was, and actually kidnapped me off the playground, screaming and fighting, but when you're five years old and you get a thump on the head, you kind of be quiet, and she said, "We're going to Arizona," but she took a strange route to Arizona, and we ended up what I later learned was Michigan, upper Michigan, Upper Peninsula, and this is a whole different lifestyle.
Frank Shankwitz: Our home for that summer she introduced me to was a tent and a campground right on Lake Michigan shores, and I'm going from a real nice city type livelihood to, all of a sudden, nothing and, again, very traumatic for a while, especially very little to eat, no food, and she's gone all day. She's working in this one little village that was close by, leaving me by myself, but it turned out to be somewhat of a good thing in the long run because I had to start learning survival, self-survival.
Frank Shankwitz: I just explored. I learned about the country life. I learned about the woods. I'm watching other people what to do. I even taught myself how to swim by just watching other people and actually began to enjoy that until the winter hit, and then she found, because it's just... We can't stay in the snow there in the tent, but she found just an old, old farmhouse, drafty and everything, and that was like that for several years up until 10 years old when my mother... when my father found us, and he went in to get the local sheriff to have her arrested.
Frank Shankwitz: During that time, she threw everything we had in... which wasn't much... In a car, and we started that journey to Arizona. It took six weeks, and, again, I had really no idea where Arizona was. I had watched some Western movies every now and then, and the reason it took so long is she would drive for half a day, she'd be low on money, she'd get a job at a local restaurant as a waitress, get enough tip money for gas, and off we go, and during that whole journey, we're sleeping in the car.
Frank Shankwitz: We just get outside of a little town called Seligman, Arizona, up on the northern part of Arizona, on old Route 66, and she ran out of gas completely, and it's the first time I'd ever seen her cry, and she said, "I have no money. We have no food. We have nothing. I don't know what we're going to do." A rancher stopped by, asked what's going on, and he said, "I'll go get some gas. You follow me to the ranch house and you can stay with us," until get settled.
Frank Shankwitz: Now, Seligman, Arizona, again, this little town of 500, hasn't grown much since, and this is in 1953 now, 500 people, predominantly Mexican, Indian. It was a railroad town, a ranching town, and the rancher did take us in. We got to sleep for six weeks. Our bedroom was the kitchen floor and a couple of bedrolls, but, to me, this was just great. I mean, it was warm.
Frank Shankwitz: We had some food. I mean, they were helping us out as much as they could, and I enrolled in school, because I had jumped from school to school, and this was actually the first town we had ever lived in. We'd always lived somewhere out in the country, and I got a job as a dishwasher at 10 years old, and my mother got a job as a maid, and after about six weeks, they found an old, wrecked travel trailer for us to live in, fixed it up enough where we had cold water, no shower or anything like that. In fact, it didn't even have indoor plumbing, but we had other facilities we could use.
Chitra Ragavan: That's when you met somebody who would turn out to have an incredible influence on your life.
Frank Shankwitz: Exactly. As I said, 10 years old, washing dishes, I'm getting off late one afternoon. I'm watching a man. I've been watching him, a little Mexican man across the street building something. He's got the frame up and starting on the interior work, and I just went over and I said, "Hi. What are you doing?" and he said, "What's your name?" and I said, "My name is Frank." He said, "I'm Juan, and, from now on, your name is Poncho," meaning Frank in Spanish. Just the smile on this guy's face, and I immediately liked him.
Frank Shankwitz: He said, "Grab a hammer kid," and I said, "I don't know what to do," because I never had a father figure teach me anything like carpentry or any type of skills like that, and Juan became my father, my mentor figure. He really took me under his wing, as they call it, and just taught me so many things, the biggest thing, work ethic, about integrity, character, and after we... He introduced me to music. He introduced me to sports, which I had never played before, just got me involved in all the little things, and along with the other town people. Like I say, it takes... They say it takes a village to raise a child. That was true in this little town of Seligman.
Chitra Ragavan: Why do you think he took such an interest in your life?
Frank Shankwitz: I don't know. I really don't know. I mean, he had children of his own, but that was just the way it was with these small towns as I learned especially when you're by yourself or whatever it might be. Everybody is always helping one another, and that was a big thing that he said, and after a couple of years, he said, "Frank, when you can, I want you to give back."
Frank Shankwitz: Now, this was 1950s. Give back is a popular term today, but it wasn't then. I said, "Juan, what do you mean give back? We don't have a thing. The poor people are helping us," and he said, "You don't have to have money to give back," and this is the biggest lesson. He said, "You can give back your time," and he gave an example. "Look at Mrs. Sanchez, the Widow Sanchez. She is always bringing you beans and tortillas, helping to feed you, helping you out a little bit, but look at her yard. It's a mess. You're big enough. You can go over there and clean that yard. Weed it. Clean it up. Help paint that porch. The same with Mrs. Ortega. They're always helping you out. They've got an old caboose from the Santa Fe Line. It's going to be their home now, and they're trying to paint that. You can go over and help them and get that out. Give back. You don't have to have money," and that lesson has stayed with me my whole life.
Chitra Ragavan: Hard work, too. You worked some really hard jobs at an incredibly young age, including for the Santa Fe Railroad when......
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