JAN. 29, 2003 | The questions for the man with the disfigured face came from classrooms around the state:

“How do you lick your lips?”

”Did you have to go through therapy to learn to talk again?”

Rick Bender, formerly a baseball player with the California Angels organization, spoke to junior and senior high students at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) and in classrooms around the state yesterday morning about the cancer that destroyed his jaw and severely damaged his mouth, teeth, tongue, neck, and arm muscles.

”It’s amazing that I can speak at all. I can’t even lick my lips [and] now I’ve got a face that nobody forgets,” he told a spellbound audience of teenagers.

Bender spoke at a program of the UAMS Rural Hospital Program. The Coalition for a Tobacco Free Arkansas and the Arkansas Cancer Coalition provided funding for Bender’s appearance and for pizzas and soft drinks for about 160 students from Arkansas Baptist High School , Jacksonville Junior High School , and Sheridan Junior High School in the UAMS campus auditorium.

Students in Crawfordsville, Booneville, Jonesboro , Springdale , Batesville, Marvell, Marianna, Conway , Texarkana , El Dorado , Fort Smith Southside, and Fort Smith Northside also watched and heard him speak via interactive television hook-ups.

After using snuff for 12 years, Bender had four operations for undifferentiated squamous cell carcinoma at the ages of 26 and 27. The teenagers in the UAMS campus audience listened closely to his story of first using snuff as a teenager, increasing his use as a baseball player, the many months when he ignored a painful sore in his mouth, and the harrowing week when he waited for the results of a biopsy before learning he had life-threatening cancer.

”I can still remember,” he said. “It was the worst week of my life.”

Bender has worked as a consultant to the Office of the Surgeon General and to Major League Baseball and travels the country speaking to students about the dangers of tobacco use.

”I’m trying to get you to keep from being their customers. That’s my way of getting even,” he said of the tobacco companies that marketed snuff to teenagers and baseball fans as a safe alternative to cigarettes.

The UAMS Rural Hospital Program provides distance education services to rural hospitals and schools in Arkansas and surrounding states.

Students from central Arkansas were plainly horrified by speaker Rick Bender’s story of developing cancer from using snuff. (Kevin Christensen)  Click on photo for larger image.



Rick Bender showed students at a program of the UAMS Rural Hospital Program the snuff that gave him cancer of the mouth, jaw, and neck. (Kevin Christensen) Click on photo for larger image.  

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