The Big Board

Three Strikes, Not Out

Tom Marcus

While his Yale friends were setting off in the 1970s to see the world during winter break, Tom Marcus was descending into the world of ALS. Looking back on those painful trips to St. Louis to visit his sick mother, Marcus admits, “I was an angry, self-absorbed 21-year-old unequipped to deal with the realities of this disease.” By the end, his mom could communicate only with her eyelids, using a blinking alphabet his father and sister Crystal had devised. She died at age 48.

That would be just the beginning of Marcus’s ALS odyssey. Nineteen years later, after finishing law school at Berkeley and embarking on a successful business career, he got the news that his father also had the dreaded disease. In St. Louis, Marcus’s stepmother handled her husband’s care with finesse, easing the burden on the children. His father died in 1998.

Marcus’s third encounter with ALS didn’t take place long distance. In San Francisco, where he’d gone into business, his good friend Bob Packard—another consummate businessman—was stricken with the disease in his early 40s. “In some ways this hit me harder,” reflects Marcus, “because I worked so closely with him and he was a contemporary. I told him he drew the card I should have gotten. Bob was an unbelievably great guy.”

Marcus watched as Packard and his friend Anne Martin chased down every lead toward a cure and found himself swept up in ALS activism. Packard found hope in neurologist Jeff Rothstein. But Packard had an unusually aggressive case of ALS and died at 41. In the months before his death, he co-founded The Robert Packard Center for ALS Research. Today this center stands as a tribute to Packard’s resolve.

As the newest member of the Packard Center board, Marcus says, “We are getting close to finding a cure but we must keep raising consciousness and funds until that happy day comes.” Marcus is president and CEO of Everyone.net, a leading provider of outsourced custom e-mail solutions for individuals and companies around the world, based in San Jose, Calif. He and his wife, Catherine, and two stepchildren live in Atherton, 30 miles south of San Francisco.