Roger Ebert Makes a Grandpa's Last Wish Come True

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It might sound funny, but when Rachel Estrada Ryan's grandfather, "Grandpa Joe," was told last November that he had metastatic gallbladder cancer and didn't have long to live, his loudest protest was that he hadn't seen the movie Secretariat yet.

The 85-year-old Staten Island man talked so much about the movie (already out of theaters but months away from being released on DVD), that Rachel's mother pleaded with her, "If there's any way you can figure out how to get him this movie .... "

Turns out, she did find a way, with the help of Roger Ebert and Bill Nack, the author of the book the film is based on. Her story was recently chronicled on Ebert's blog.

"He'd been carrying with him the notion that he would see this movie at his earliest opportunity," Rachel explained to Roger Ebert in an email. "Never mind his preceding fondness for the racehorse and its moment in history — there was also *Diane Lane* to consider. (It turns out — and I never really knew this before — my grandfather has a major thing for Diane Lane.) And then there he was, stuck with cancer, stuck dying, stuck in movie limbo."

roger-ebert.jpgHeartbreaking, right? Rachel didn't tell anyone, but she sent the whole touching story to Ebert without telling anyone, without expecting much. She knew that Ebert had beaten cancer himself and often interacted with his fans. "'It never hurts to try' is sort of the motto that I live my life by," she told Tonic.

She couldn't believe her luck when Ebert wrote back to say that he had forwarded her message to Nack, his old college friend. Nack, meanwhile, was working with Disney to have a DVD sent directly to Grandpa Joe. He even looked Joe up in the phone book and called to tell him the movie was on its way.

This small measure from these two men amounted to a minor miracle for a family in crisis. Rachel reports that Grandpa Joe is still fighting, but is slowly deteriorating. "He's certainly tickled by the whole thing," she reports. "But it's something for all of us."

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