Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation Vice President Liz Scott says she was shocked and devastated to learn, two days before her daughter’s first birthday, that Alex had pediatric cancer. “I thought there could be something seriously wrong with her, but it never crossed my mind that it would be cancer.”

At the age of four Alex opened her first lemonade stand to raise money for research into childhood cancer.  After she died at the age of eight, in 2004, Scott says she and her husband decided they had to continue the effort, and their daughter’s reaction to money collected during her final year of life guided them.

“I said very proudly, ‘We’re giving it to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia so they can research Neuroblastoma.’  That’s the type of cancer Alex had, but there are more than a dozen types of childhood cancer, many more than that if you count the rare ones, so she started shaking her head and I said, ‘Alex, what’s the problem?’ and she said, ‘That is so selfish.  All kids want their tumors to go away.’”

Scott says they donate Alex’s Lemonade Stand proceeds to childhood cancer research all over North America, but mostly in the United States.  She appeared recently on the WNPV talk program Comment Please by Univest.  It was re-broadcast Monday.