MAN TO MAN -SARASOTA
(PROSTATE CANCER PATIENT SUPPORT)
2801 Fruitville Road, Suite 250 PW
Sarasota, Florida 34237
(941)365-2858

(Man to Man - Sarasota is a not-for-profit group organized to educate and inform its members on matters concerning prostate cancer. The organization does not dispense medical advice.  Meetings are normally held on the fourth Monday at 2:00 p.m. in Sarasota Memorial Hospital although variations on this schedule do occur.  Call the number above for further information.)

<The opinions expressed herein are not necessarily those of the American Cancer Society.>>

Sarasota Newsletters

An Account of a Taped Interview with James F. Mullen. Chairman Emeritus. and Founder of Man To Man. the Prostate Cancer Survivor's Support Group.  

At his temporary residence 
Wynwood 
 3749 Sarasota Square Boulevard 
Sarasota, FL 34328 

On the afternoon of 30 October 1996 
by Robert L. Weitzel
Archivist and Historian
Sarasota Unit 
4360 Center Gate Boulevard
Sarasota. FL 34233

Family and Biography

I was born April 16, 1918 in Wilmington, Delaware, the seventh of eight children. I had four sisters and three brothers. My father was James Francis Mullen, so I am a Junior. My mother was Hannah Theresa Lucey. My father died when I was between four and five years of age and my mother did a remarkable job of raising the family. She bought a little corner grocery store, we went into business and that was what carried us through. I was the first in the family to get to high school and college. I graduated from the University of Delaware with a Bachelor of Science degree in January 1942 in time to catch the beginning of World War II. I had been in the ROTC and received a commission as a Second Lieutenant in the U.S. Army upon graduation.  

Soon thereafter, I resigned my Army commission and on January 12, 1942 joined the Marine Corps as a Second Lieutenant. My duty station was the Officer Candidate School at Quantico, Virginia where I was an instructor. I served two years in this country and two years in the Pacific.  I married Marion "Mike" Louise Stites on May 8, 1943 in her home town of Westchester Pennsylvania. "Mike" was born on February 6, 1921. 

The Stites family goes back to whalers who owned much of what, today, is Cape May, New Jersey.  We had two daughters, Janice, "Jinx" and Patricia, "Pat," whose married names are Janice Harding and Patricia Doennig.  

I had a good health record all through my life and played sports in high school and college. While in service at Quantico, Virginia I had a chance to remain in good physical health.  

I was discharged with the rank of Captain from the Marine Corps on January 18, 1946 and went into graduate studies for a Masters degree at the University of Delaware. While doing graduate work I was hired by the DuPont Company as a Biological Technician. This was a new field for DuPont and they thought this would be a reasonable start for a small group at the University. 

DuPont had the capacity and research facilities suitable for pharmaceuticals. I did screening of chemical compounds for possible biological use, and later, became a Biologist. I stayed with them for about fifteen years and left in 1961.  In about 1962-63 I went into business for myself in Hatteras, North Carolina.  I bought a marina and distribution outlet for Texaco Petroleum Products. We had docks and we grew quite a bit in that facility. After that we retired again, to Corvallis, Oregon and lived there for a number of years. 

In 1985 I moved to Sarasota, Florida and lived in retirement with my wife. We had some wonderful times here. In 1986 some urological symptoms developed.  PSA tests were not available so prostatic tissue biopsies were taken. These led to a diagnosis of prostate cancer. 

I was 68 years of age and my Urologist stated I was too old for surgery. I was referred to a Radiation Oncology organization and was given 7 kilo-rads of external beam radiation. Twenty months after the completion of treatment, in the Spring of 1988, PSA tests became available and I had a test that revealed my PSA to be 18. Subsequent tests revealed the PSA levels to be rising.  

I found it very difficult, ...extremely difficult, to get any information from doctors or from various sources and did quite a bit of research running down all the possible leads and information I could about prostate cancer. I could not find doctors or other men who were willing to talk about prostate cancer, the outlook for survival, or the protocols that were available. None of that was made public, so I started to dig in and found cancer support groups in Sarasota that were primarily for women and dealt with women's problems. I finally decided I was on the wrong track. 

How Man To Man Started

With my wife's urging, I realized the need to start up a men's group on prostate cancer to develop a source of information. So it was here in Sarasota that we began to gather information. 

We became aware of a Doctor La Brea in Canada who had research going on Lupron and Flutamide. He was not taken seriously in the United States because of the unknowns of the Lupron-Flutamide combination treatment. As it turned out years later, this combination treatment was a savior for a lot of us who had become refractory to the few other treatments that were then being tried by the medical profession. After a few years of hit and miss, the combination treatment was approved by the American Medical Association and we gave it a push here in Sarasota.

In September 1989 Richard Cross, DDS (deceased), William Hechman (deceased), Ben McLeod, Bernard Schneider, John Stone and I got involved in a program that led to the founding of the group that was to become Man To Man. The early meeting locations rotated in the homes of these six people. We tried several times to get backing from the Sarasota Unit of the American Cancer Society, but they did their utmost to dissuade us. Nor could we get backing from any of the pharmaceutical houses. We were not easily dissuaded. 

I went to my physician, Doctor Phyllis Stephenson, a Medical Oncologist, and told her that I was having difficulty dealing with the Sarasota Unit of ACS to take on the program. I also told her I was having difficulty getting the men involved in the program if women were in the meetings. It was Dr. Stephenson who suggested that we call it "for men only," and name it "Man To Man". It was a wonderful bit of advice as it did exactly what we wanted it to do.  

Finally, Sarasota Memorial Hospital offered to back us, to do our printing, and intercede to make it known to the doctors that we were available for consultation for other prostate cancer patients. In January 1990 the Hospital was able to provide space for the Man To Man meetings.  

At the beginning there was some doubt that the endeavor would succeed. It was because of the strong support that was received from some of the doctors that got us off to a flying start. We developed a program that would cover the entire field of medicine as it relates to prostate cancer. We had Pharmacologists, Pathologists, Nutritionists, Radiologists, Urologists, on down the line, so that by the end of the year the men would receive a very broad, a very detailed discussion by these experts. It was most helpful that this was made available. Over the period of a year we were getting an hour of a doctor's time, in consultation, actually. It was very appealing, very educational and rewarding that the knowledge we gained allowed us to pass it onto others.

There were some members of the Man To Man group whom we knew as "snowbirds," who wanted to have such a program in their community when they returned home. The question came up, "How do you do this? How did you get this started?"  Having done it ourselves, we published a little booklet on how to begin. By this time we were getting the support of the Sarasota Unit of the American Cancer Society. In October 1993 the Division (State) Level of the American Cancer Society came into the picture and asked permission to "take the program and run with it," under their auspices along with Sarasota Memorial Hospital. To this we gave them approval along with the right to use the program. So we wrote it up and we made an agreement with the American Cancer Society Florida Division and that worked out real well.

The American public was, by now, becoming aware of prostate cancer. It was new, and was being talked about for the first time. It was a time when men would not talk about it in public or mixed company. Mixed company would not discuss such a personal problem that men have with this disease such as incontinence and impotence. For these reasons we felt we had to make our meetings for men only.  In August 1994 the National group of the American Cancer Society, out of Atlanta, came to us and asked to use the program nation wide. We were thrilled with this offer so we absolutely encouraged them to "pick up and run" with the Man To Man program which they did and are doing. Apparently they were in need of a program and here was one that was fully operational. It tested local units of the ACS, such as Sarasota, and then State-wide, such as the Florida Division of the ACS. It didn't have any "bugs" in it, so it worked out well.

This "men only" thing went on until about half-way through the first year and at that time we started to get complaints from wives. The women needed this information as much as the men and they began to be heard. So we made an adjustment in our schedule and would invite the women, along with their husbands, to come to the meetings on the fourth Monday of every quarter. This worked out well and they had their chance to have a "shot at it". They came back not long after that with the feeling that they were missing too much, that they wanted to be involved in the program in more depth than they were getting. At that time we asked them to start their own group, using speakers that were available. Joan Kinter, of Venice, Florida headed up this effort. They named their group "Side By Side" and held their meeting the same day as ours with another doctor in another room at Sarasota Memorial Hospital. This went on for about the first year but the women were having difficulty getting this thing really fired up.

It was decided, by vote, by the attendees at one of our meetings that we should make the meeting open to both males and females. The public had become much more acceptable to talking about the facts of prostate cancer on their sex life and the problems associated with prostate cancer. Now we're getting quite a respectable showing of women with their husbands coming to our once-a-month meetings and sharing the knowledge their husband gets. 

Looking back, we still feel the initial move to get started on a man-only basis was, indeed, a good move. It opened the doors and we had very little complaint, and that came from the wives, that we were shutting them out. We got that corrected and now it's going full blast. I don't believe there are very many groups left in the country that have "men-only", and Side By Side groups. We are more or less co-educational.

Many good reports are coming out of the field regarding Man To Man. Books have been written about it, and several are available from the American Cancer Society and from private individuals. 

Concerns

I feel that we are on the right track, yet there is a direction we should examine. There are two areas in which we are weak: 

First, we are not reaching the men who probably need this more than anybody else. These are the younger men, the business men who are working until five or six o'clock at night and are not getting the exposure to these programs. We have primarily retirees, so we meet on afternoons, because it's difficult for a lot of people to drive at night. We are missing this target, the younqer men, whom we would want to get, to catch their possible prostate cancers at an early stage. We should be taking corrective measures. 

Second, our meetings are getting too large.  We get sixty to eighty people in a meeting and often the presentation is of interest to a very small portion of the group. We should do something to make it of special interest to certain people who will have the time and interest to sit out an hour's lecture. 

Looking back at our earlier days when we had small groups, we found it was more of a personal thing and we had the opportunity to get personally acquainted with others. We felt much freer in our expressions of interest, comments and relationships in those smaller groups than we are now experiencing in these larger groups.

We need a different time frame to reach the younger men. For example, you take the city's police force or firemen. If we could arrange schedules to go into stations

How Man To Man came under the auspices of the American Cancer Society 

The national office of ACS is very conscious of public relations.  US TOO, a prostate cancer support group, in full stride, operating out of Chicago, Illinois, and Man To Man, Sarasota, Florida were invited to Atlanta by the national office of ACS to make presentations about each of their programs. I went up to them in Atlanta on three different occasions to talk to them at three different levels of management. I said this is what we've done, and this is our little book on how to do it. After much consideration they chose our program as the one they would want to have as their program. So we presented the results of our discussions with the ACS Atlanta Office to our Sarasota Man To Man Incorporated group here in Sarasota and they said, "sure", not knowing for sure that we might be "putting the fox in the hen house." That was our big concern.  The time we spent analyzing it, (joining forces with ACS) indicated this would be one way to perpetuate Man To Man. To give it to an organization, like these people, (ACS) who have outlets allover the United States, 3400 as a matter of fact, and we could hand them a package that we could never afford, financially or in manpower, to take it nationwide. So this was a real blessing in disguise for them to come to us, saying, "can we have it?" "Yes, you can have it with our blessing, we'll help you however we can."  

How about giving me that top piece, Bob? (Mullen reading from the November 11-16, 1995 ACS 82nd Annual Meeting Bulletin, Marriott Hotel, Chicago, Illinois)  ..........Mullen, for founding the Man To Man program to support and educate prostate cancer survivors, and for overseeing the Society's effort to make the Man To Man program available nationwide.  We are still looking over their shoulder and they admit they don't know anything about prostate cancer.

 Question: Weitzel- When you say we're looking over their shoulder, do you mean Sarasota Man To Man Inc.? 

Answer: Mullen- Yes

Question: Weitzel- Did I understand you to say that US TOO gave a presentation and Man To Man gave a presentation, and of the two presentations, only Man To Man was selected? (by the National Office of the American Cancer Society)? 

Answer: Mullen-Right

We have periodic meetings with the national office and we discuss with them where they are, what they're doing, things we like, things we don't like. It's usually they who have the questions and they would like to hear more discussion about 11th is area, SO and so, and it works out quite well.  I appreciate what you have done, and are doing, to make this part of our history in black-and-white, so to speak. It's great that it's going to be available, going into the archives, because it will be researched one of these days. It's going to be valuable basic information to have. 

Weitzel:  As Doctor Treiman mentioned (at our 25 October 1996 Man To Man meeting), he speaks with people at the national level who don't have a clue as to how this thing ever got started, or where it got started, or who started it. So I just felt that it was something I wanted to try to accomplish with you. Thank you very much, it was a privilege.

Awards received bv James E. Mullen

Service to Mankind Award- for Exceptional Service to Sarasota and America through MAN TO MAN.II- Awarded by Sertoma Club of Greater Sarasota 1993

American Cancer Society Sarasota Unit Courage Award -1995 -"In Recognition of Courage, Determination and a Positive Attitude in Fighting Cancer. "- Awarded by the Florida Division, Inc.

"In  Recognition and Appreciation for Your Tireless Efforts on Behalf of Your Fellow Survivors in Florida and Throughout the Nation"- Presented by the American Cancer Society, Florida Division, Inc. to JAMES F. MULLEN, Founder of MAN TO MAN Prostate Cancer Education and Support Program-September 16, 1995

Honorary Life Member -"Presented with Deepest Gratitude and Admiration to JIM MULLEN on Your Election as an Honorary Life Member."-Awarded by the American Cancer Society, Sarasota County Unit, Board of Directors, Sept. 27, 1995

Distinguished Service Award -The Leading award of the American Cancer Society, in Chicago, Illinois, in November 1995. "For founding the MAN TO MAN program to support and educate prostate cancer survivors, and for overseeing the Society's effort to make the MAN TO MAN program available nationwide." This was the first instance of the award being given a layman. Prior to this time the award was only given to professional medical recipients.

James Mullen passed away January 6th, 1997