You Won't Believe What This Cancer Survivor Did With His Travel Gift

Cancer survivor Rick Binaco with coworker Maria Iadonisi, who gave him a $1,200 travel gift certificate, and travel agent Carol Crothers, who honored it even though it had been expired for eight years. (Photo: APP.com/Jerry Carino)

We’ve heard about pilots going out of their way to help grieving family members, flight attendants helping out with crying babies, and airplane passengers buying tickets for other passengers, but the Asbury Park Press has found what could be the sweetest and most inspiring travel angel story of them all.

The year 2003 was rough for New Jersey resident Rick Binaco; both he and his wife were suffering from cancer. So in an effort to show support and bring a little light to the couple, Binaco’s coworkers pooled their money and bought them a $1,200 gift certificate through Sunrise Travel in Sea Girt, N.J.

“He always wanted to go to Italy,” Binaco’s coworker Maria Iadonisi told columnist Jerry Carino of the Asbury Park Press. “I wanted him to feel like he had something to look forward to.”

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Unfortunately, Binaco’s wife passed away soon after, and when he recovered from his illness and moved to a different town, he lost track of the gift certificate.

Fast forward to October 2015, when Binaco moved yet again and finally rediscovered the paper among his belongings. “There it was, sitting in the middle of my table,” he told the APP. There was a complication, however: it had expired in 2007.

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Not one to give up, Binaco contacted the travel agency and connected with its president, Carol Crothers, who remembered him from all those years ago when his colleagues bought him the gift. She would have been happy to renew the certificate in any case, but the trip Binaco wanted to take clinched the deal.

He didn’t want to use the found money for an island getaway or a trip to Italy for himself — he wanted to use it to pay forward the goodwill he’d been given: He wanted to attend a fundraiser for St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, where he’d been a regular donor for the past 25 years.

“St. Jude’s is my passion,” Binaco says in a video interview with the newspaper. “And to think of these children going through what I went through is so overwhelming to me that I made it one of my main projects in life to raise money for St. Jude’s and be part of St. Jude’s, and I have been for well over 20 years.”

Talk about travel being the gift that keeps on giving.

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None other than St. Jude’s spokesperson Marlo Thomas (whose father, comedian Danny Thomas, founded the hospital in 1962) heard about Bianco’s selflessness and met him at the fundraiser to thank him for his remarkable generosity.

We commend him too — travel really can change lives, and not just your own.

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