ANTIGO — In the summer of 2017, Eli Kassler seemed for all the world to be a normal, healthy kid. He was more than healthy, at just 11 years old, playing for an elite hockey club in Minnesota. He could score goals in bunches. Marcus Novy, the head coach of the Milwaukee Junior Admirals, coached him in several all-star games, and called him the most talented player in all of Wisconsin.
Out of the blue that August, though, Corrie Kassler, Eli’s mother, became aware of inexplicable bruises on his legs. Around the same time, something else occurred that had never happened before to the normally-tireless Eli.
He was getting fatigued, so fatigued that at hockey practices, he could barely skate. When an uncommon breakout Corrie recognized as a petechiae rash formed on her son’s face, Corrie, a nurse practitioner in Crandon, took him to work to see a colleague of hers at their clinic. Eli’s diagnosis was clear: he had leukemia.
“I don’t even know how to describe it. It wasn’t the happiest moment, that’s for sure,” Eli said. “That same day we went to the hospital in Marshfield. I didn’t have a ton of time to really think. For the first two months, I never left the hospital.”
“The first year was a really grueling year,” Corrie said. “He couldn’t play hockey or do anything. He was very affected by treatment. He got to a point where he could hardly walk. We’d have to carry him up the stairs, help him in and out of the bathtub.”
Astoundingly, after just a year, and even while he was still receiving weekly oral, IV, or spinal chemo doses, Eli was able to return to hockey — but wasn’t the player he had been.
“When he was able to get on the ice, he would just go in for a few minutes — that was a battle for him. It was a mental battle for us too to watch a kid who would normally just be all over the place scoring points and then all of a sudden he can’t hardly do anything and he’s sitting down,” Corrie said.
Now in remission for the past three years, Eli seems to have returned to the height of his powers in the rink. This season, he scored 62 goals for Antigo High School, the most in the state by over 20 goals.
Likewise, though Corrie said the ordeal has given her entire family a kind of post traumatic stress disorder, it’s also given them personal insight into childhood cancer, which hasn’t gone unharnessed.
bELIeve 15
Early in Eli’s battle with cancer, one aspect of their predicament amazed Corrie and her family: the show of support they received — and not only from those in Antigo.
“We had people reach out to us that we’d never even heard of before,” Corrie said. “People from Minnesota, people from Canada, people who knew somebody that knew somebody that knew Eli who he played hockey with on his team or against him. There was a hockey magazine that did an article on him after he was diagnosed in Minnesota. After that, we had a couple of professional athletes who reached out with some supportive things. They just called him or contacted him, which was really cool.”
After experiencing all this kindness, when Eli’s aunt Carol Berg suggested the family hold a fundraiser for childhood cancer, Corrie quickly agreed. In 2018, they hosted their first road race, called Eli’s Unite and Fight Run, and donated most of the proceeds to the Midwest Athletes against Childhood Cancer (MACC) Fund, which funds the oncology unit at Milwaukee Children’s Hospital.
Soon after, Corrie’s family decided to localize their efforts to serve mostly families in north central Wisconsin, a region which, as they knew from experience, was something of a desert in terms of hospitals that could treat children with cancer.
“You’ve got Marshfield, Green Bay, Milwaukee, and Madison — those are the only hospitals that really treat childhood cancer. So if you’re up here, you have a heck of a ways to go to get treatment,” Corrie said. “Working in healthcare up in this area, I also know that there is a really high percentage of poverty. So if you take a family who either has one parent working or just one parent, and you tell them they’re going to have to take off work — which maybe they have a good paying job or maybe they have a minimum wage paying job — and now they’re taking off work and buying gas to drive four hours each way two days a week to get treatment for their kid. The need and what that does is catastrophic for some families.”
The non-profit Corrie and her family eventually created is called bELIeve 15. One of its key functions involves giving families with children that have cancer red wagons (Wagons of Wishes, they call them) — and then filling them. There are toys and games to pass the hours. There are things for parents — organizational charts to track appointments, gas cards. Some of the most practical items are the silky soft bed sheets. When Eli first checked in to the Milwaukee Children’s Hospital, chemotherapy, as it does to most anyone with cancer, had made his skin extremely sensitive, which wasn’t helped by the fact that to avoid infection, his bed sheets were being changed every day.
“These collapsible wagons, you can put them in your car and travel back and forth with them, and that came from Eli’s situation too,” Corrie said. “I would have loved one of those when Eli was in treatment, because I can’t tell you how much stuff I was hauling in and out of the hospital on my back and under my arms and trying to find a wheelchair to put it in, because you basically lived in a room.”
Helping area families
Another area woman who basically “lived in a room” in this way was Hailey Clark, a Merrill-area woman whose six-year-old son Brandtley was diagnosed with a rare kidney cancer in 2021. Clark said the wagons were a godsend.
“When Brandtley relapsed, we were spending four, five, six days in the hospital at a time. So the wagon alone was very helpful to pack your bags so you could carry your clothes in and your bathroom supplies. It helped the parents too between blankets, pens and papers, little workbooks, a little devotional book to read. There was a bathroom bag in there, a humidifier, snacks, toys. When you get the news, everything is overwhelming and the last thing you really think about is what you need to bring to the hospital, and when you’re over an hour away, you can’t just run home and get it.
And when you need to quit working to be with your child, you don’t have a lot of extra money to go even get a bag of chips or soda. So everything in that wagon was more than beneficial and helpful in that situation,” said Clark, whose son, as of Feb. 27, is in remission.
Another wagon recipient was Kimber Habeck, a mother from Rosholt, Wis. whose four-year-old Josephine has had B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia now for eight months. To just hear Habeck tell of the string of complications her daughter has endured is gut-wrenching. Two infections to the port where chemo is delivered into her. Headaches from the spinal tap procedures.
“Your mind starts to race and your heart breaks,” said Habeck, whose voice broke too as she spoke. “You’re so overwhelmed and you don’t know any answers. And as a parent, my job is to protect my daughter, and especially when she’s only four years old. My kisses should be enough to fix any owie she has, and that’s just not the case when you have a child with cancer.”
Habeck said not long after arriving at Marshfield Clinic, they too received one of the wagons from bELIve 15. It not only contained toys for Josephine, but also, particularly touching to Habeck, things for her and her husband’s other three children. Often, Josephine rides in and out of the hospital in the wagon.
“In June and July, we were hospitalized for 17 days straight, and that wagon allowed us to bring things back and forth and not spend as much time away from Josie hauling things in and out of the hospital,” Habeck said. “There have been countless times where my husband and I were like, ‘Man, we would just be lost without this.’ I think the greatest thing about the organization are the people who are actually behind it like Corrie. I know that in a moment’s notice, I can call her with questions or ask her what her journey was like. It makes it feel a little less lonely. Because there’s somebody who has literally walked in my shoes.”
People to rally around
Two Sundays ago at Northstar Lanes, bELIeve 15 held a fundraiser for their cause. There was a cornhole tournament, raffles, and even a blood drive (one of the most critical elements in fighting cancer, almost everyone interviewed for this story agreed).
The night before, Feb. 17, yet another benefit was held for childhood cancer at the bowling alley. This one was a comedy show featuring four comedians, including Antigo native Brady Gregurich, who has put on the event five different times since his niece Jayden died of brain cancer in 2009.
“The times I got to babysit her, we would just hang out, play outside, play Nintendo Wii. She would always kick my butt at Mario Kart. I was just trying to be a cool uncle for her, and all those times, she just made me smile and made me laugh hanging out with her,” Gregurich remembered. “I was in college at the time when she got sick. It’s the most devastating, saddest news you can ever imagine. You never ever want to hear anything like that, especially with anybody in your family or anybody that you’re close to, especially when it’s a kid that you’re close with that’s part of your family. That’s just the worst. The worst. All you want to do is help them.”
Proceeds from Gregurich’s comedy benefit, labeled Chuckles 5, which in past years went to the Ronald McDonald House and other organizations that had helped Jayden during her treatment in Milwaukee, this year went to a specific child in the area battling cancer: Walter Mattmiller, the two-year-old son of Northstar owner Brian Mattmiller, a lifelong friend of Gregurich’s.
“She was such a good kid and had such a good sense of humor, so the goal with the benefit was to kind of carry her memory on and also donate the money in her name to places that helped her out when she was sick. The turnout that we’ve had every year that we’ve done it has been incredible from the community,” Gregurich said. “We’ve had over 300 people the past two years, so the Antigo community has been nothing short of spectacular every year that we’ve put on the benefit. They’ve come out in droves. They’re always so appreciative and so kind with their words and showing their support for helping kids out. It’s always an overwhelming but heartwarming thing to see the support we get every year.”
Mattmiller said people like Gregurich and the Kasslers are pillars in the community for stepping forward to help local families like his passing through such harrowing straits.
“People like that just rally everyone around them for really awful situations that families are going through, and I think that’s a big kudos to Antigo in general,” Mattmiller said. “And it’s not just in Antigo. There were people here from all over the place, a couple hours away, that were here to support Brady and here to support us. People rally around good people. Corrie and Brady most certainly are good people. They’re people who are able to help others who have a question mark later in life. The area needs more people like that.”
bELIeve 15, as a 501C3 non-profit, has no overhead fees and is completely run by volunteers, so all funds donated go directly to children battling cancer. To learn more about bELIeve 15, go to www.believe15.com or email believe15eli@gmail.com.
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