Lemonade sales to honor a young victim of cancer

Simon Vodosek and grade school were together only briefly, but it was a great match. He loved to learn, liked science and math and reading. He had a wry sense of humor, a wide circle of friends and the appealing ability to pull people of all ages close to him.

He also had very little time. Simon died last August from neuroblastoma — cancer that in the end simply got the best of him.

Tuesday, his friends are running a lemonade stand to celebrate what would have been his eighth birthday, the proceeds to benefit pediatric cancer research.

Children from Uintah Elementary are setting up their lemonade stand in Liberty Heights Fresh, a specialty food store at 1100 East and 1300 South, after school, from 3:30 to 5:30 p.m. Besides the lemonade stand money (suggested donation: $1), one-tenth of the day's total proceeds will go to the research fund. And the children will get to have some birthday cake with Simon's parents, Mary Craig and Markus Vodosek, and Simon's little sister Miriam.

Simon was only 4 1/2 when he was diagnosed in December 2001. He'd had a stiff neck and was limping quite a bit. At first doctors thought it was a femur not developing well. Then they suspected leukemia. Ultimately, he was diagnosed with a metastatic neuroblastoma in his bone marrow, from a tumor located off his spinal column near his left adrenal gland.

Besides little-boy pursuits, like Yu-Gi-Oh cards and Pokemon and riding his bike, Simon had to endure chemotherapy, surgery, one clinical drug trial, a stem cell transplant, radiation therapy and antibody therapy, none of it pleasant.

Nothing ever seemed to work. But he was still doing quite well, his mother said. He made it to half his kindergarten year and attended school 120 out of 180 first-grade days.

He was jealous of a friend who had perfect attendance; he really loved school. His mom went with him to school a couple of times to draw blood as a demonstration for his classmates, but he was a little private about his health.

He was good friends with Tobias Rosenberg. And Noah Rosenberg, a fourth-grader, was his "big buddy" in school. So it was a natural for their dad, Stephen Rosenberg, who owns Liberty Heights Fresh, to suggest the lemonade stand, which is patterned after a tradition started by a little girl back East who had cancer. Alex Scott decided at age 4 to raise money for "her hospital." She had a lemonade stand that just kept growing. Since 2000, her lemonade stand raised more than $1.5 million for pediatric cancer research.

She died just five days before Simon, but her lemonade stand has been adopted as a fund-raiser across the nation for pediatric cancer research.

The Uintah Elementary schoolchildren raised $1,800 for research right after Simon died.