Joel Siegel's Cancer Battle Prompts Book for Son
June 26, 2003 — -- Spend an afternoon with Joel Siegel and his 5-year-old son Dylan, and you can see it — just below the surface of the laughter and the goofing around: There is in this relationship a desperate urgency.
Because Joel, who's nearly 60, is not just an older dad. He's an older dad with cancer.
So now Joel is trying to convey what most dads do in, say, 20 years — into 2, or 3, or well, he doesn't really know. And that's why he has put it all in writing — his life, his beliefs, his family history — in Lessons for Dylan, a book for Dylan to read whenever he's ready.
Humor is one of Joel's great lessons for Dylan. It's gotten Joel through tough times — humor and his own personal Rat Pack, which includes people like CNN's Jeff Greenfield.
"He did not need his friends to remind him that he was going through a tough time. We're there for him to be friends and to throw the proper level of insults at him and all that," Greenfield said.
Another lesson: understanding Joel's own up-from-the-bootstraps history: his Jewish heritage, growing up poor in East L.A. and heading to the South as a student in the turbulent '60s.
That's another lesson for Dylan: standing up for what's right.
Joel recalls, "I was a civil rights worker in 1965 — I'm really proud of that. I knew Martin Luther King — even more, he knew me — incredible! … I wrote jokes for Bobby Kennedy."
Joel began his career as a writer but soon found himself on television. He hardly looked the part, but he's stayed on the air for more than 25 years, most of it as ABC's entertainment editor.
Appreciating the career highs … that's another lesson for Dylan. And so is learning how to cope with the lows. Like the death in 1982 of Joel's wife Jane from brain cancer. She was only 31.
"I told my shrink that I was feeling angry and she says yeah, you're angry you didn't get to grow old together," he said.
