RU Students Vividly Glimpse

“You can be honest. How many of you have tried chewing tobacco?”

Several clusters of students in the audience raised their hands.

“It’s all right. I had too,” said Rick Bender, the speaker, who then shared his personal saga.

Growing up outside of San Diego, Cal. and under the influence of peer pressure and the conflicting desire to keep his lungs healthy, he tried smokeless tobacco when he was 12, using it as an alternative to cigarettes.

By high school, Bender was using a couple of cans a week.

He was drafted to play minor league baseball for the California Angels and because of the association of baseball and tobacco, his addiction grew. Near Christmas of 1988, when Bender was just 26 years old, he was diagnosed with carcinoma, a cancer that never goes into remission.

In April of ’89, he underwent the first of five surgeries to remove the cancer, losing half of his jaw, a third of his tongue, and 25% of the use of his right arm—his throwing arm.

Bender hopes to use the image of his misshapen face to reinforce his message, and, as his slogan goes, to “give people something else to chew on.”

It is this story that has brought him from his hometown, outside of San Diego California, to schools and organizations around the country. He has spoken on MTV, HBO, and most recently, on CBS. He has made an appearance on Good Morning America and has been traveling around the country for 18 years.

Organized by health teacher Deb Lary, the assembly was attended by all of RTCC, as well as grades seven through ten at the high school. Northfield’s Student Assistance Program Counselor Annie Luke organized the presentations. The two schools split the costs of the speaker’s airfare and lodging, though a grant for tobacco prevention covered much the expense.

“You never know the impact that awareness and education will have,” Lary said. “You can’t know the end result, but with students staying after the presentation, students sharing that they want to quit, it’s a testimony to how effective he was.”

“I don’t want to preach to you, I just want to tell my story,” Bender said. Even with his quitting tobacco, his survival, his cancer, the torturous ordeal, his addiction lives on.

“Even after 21 years,” he says, “I still like to smell it, I can still almost taste it.” The power of addiction is something he hopes listeners will remember.

As Lary put it, “In order for a behavioral change, you have to have a conscious awareness that something’s wrong.”

Education is a good first step.