Thousands remember Carol Baldwin’s life and her crusade against breast cancer - syracuse.com

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Bruce Wademan’s mom died of breast cancer years ago.

To honor her, the family asked for donations to the Carol M. Baldwin Breast Cancer Research Fund of CNY.

To Wademan’s surprise, Carol and her daughter, Beth, showed up at his mom’s wake.

“We didn’t expect that,” he said Friday, one day after Carol Baldwin died.

“They were very gracious,’’ said Wademan, who lives in Camillus, the same town that Baldwin called home. “I was sad to hear the news as she was a very nice lady.”

Carol Baldwin died Thursday at 92, with Daniel and two sisters, Jane and Beth, at her Syracuse hospital bedside. She had FaceTimed with her other sons, Alec, Billy and Stephen, and her grandchildren.

She’d been admitted with a urinary tract infection and then was diagnosed with pneumonia, according to Daniel Baldwin, who spoke at length Friday with syracuse.com | The Post-Standard about the matriarch of their family. The doctors told Baldwin and his family his mother’s body was shutting down.

“Don’t be afraid,” he said he told her. “I’ll see you on the other side.”

To Daniel and his five siblings, she was mom: The one who made sure each kid got to baseball or dance practice, the one who baked the cupcakes and kept their worlds running.

She was the one who’d still watch “Jeopardy!” with Alec, the star of television shows such as “30 Rock” and movies like “The Hunt for Red October” and “The Departed.” She was the one Daniel, who recently starred in “Hawaii Five-0,” turned to for advice, including about raising girls.

To Central New York, Carol Baldwin’s personality, passion and name were synonymous with fighting cancer. Her own experience with breast cancer decades ago led her to launch a foundation aimed at finding a cure for the second-most common cancer in women.

In that crusade, she’d show up in floor-length gowns with her sons at celebrity galas. She’d show up at high school sports games in Onondaga County, where people were competing to raise money to beat cancer.

Those efforts, with her family’s help, raised millions of dollars toward research work at two SUNY campuses, Upstate in Syracuse and Stony Brook.

“Carol was an indefatigable warrior in the fight against breast cancer,” SUNY Upstate Medical University posted on Twitter. “Her namesake fund has supported dozens of Upstate projects searching for a cancer cure. Guided by her inspiring legacy, Upstate will continue to be partners in her work.”

The news of her death spread from Syracuse to Hollywood. Celebrities who’d met her, local triathletes who’d raised money for her, and cancer survivors who’d thanked her left thousands of messages across social media on Friday. Daniel said he’d gotten too many to read. Wegmans workers and customers remembered her shopping, that she would often go through the same checkout line.

Her granddaughter, Hailey Baldwin Bieber, wrote on Instagram about the family’s loss. “Today I celebrate her, the life she lived, and the legacy she leaves behind. We love you,’’ she wrote.

Closer to home, many wrote about how Carol showed up during their hardest times.

“She came to the hospital when I was going through surgery and sat and talked to me,” Elaine Milonni-Corcoran wrote on Facebook. “She even called me a couple weeks after to ask how I was doing. Wonderful lady.”

The Baldwin children are aware of the thousands of people who loved Carol and are mourning her.

They know many would like to attend her funeral.

They’re trying to figure out how to make that happen, said Daniel from Cleveland, New York, where he and his family have gathered near Oneida Lake to make arrangements for their mom.

“She was loved,” he said.

‘She had a hundred balls in the air’

Carol and her future husband, Alexander, met while attending Syracuse University. He was a football player from Brooklyn. (More than 70 Baldwin relatives have graduated from SU, Daniel Baldwin said.)

The couple settled on Long Island. He taught at a local school. She raised the kids.

When he thinks about his childhood, Daniel Baldwin said it was pretty much “a whirling dervish.” He said he’s not sure how his mom did it all.

“She had a hundred balls in the air,” her son recalled. “One had dance, one had baseball and one had Cub Scouts. She was a 24-hour Uber service. She was always making cupcakes and brownies. She was involved in all of it, and she never stopped.”

Baldwin remembers when teachers at his dad’s school went on strike. His dad crossed the picket line because he needed a paycheck to feed his family. Still, his mom baked cupcakes and cookies for the teachers who were on strike, Daniel said.

Alexander died in 1983. Carol moved to Camillus in the late 1980s. She lived with one daughter, Beth. The other, Jane, lived just two blocks away.

‘Do you say bad words in this movie?’

When Carol Baldwin’s four sons went into acting, she was a bit freaked out, her son said. It was strange to her that her sons made it without having any legacy of acting in the family, he said.

She was a fan, but with some mom-knows-best discernment.

Before watching one of her sons’ movies, she posed three questions, Daniel Baldwin said. They never varied.

“‘Do you say bad words in this movie?’ she’d ask,” her son recalled.

“I’d say I curse like a savage,” Daniel Baldwin said.

“Oh, Daniel,” she would say. “Do you have s-e-x with a girl?”

“I’d say right on the kitchen table and it’s very graphic,” he’d tell his mom.

Another “Oh, Daniel.”

Last question: “Do you die in this movie?” mom wanted to know.

If the answer was yes, Carol Baldwin would hang up.

“She couldn’t ever watch any of us die in a movie,’’ he said.

But when she came up with her idea for trying to beat cancer, she turned to her kids, some of whom were famous, to make it work.

She called her kids home. She had an idea

Around 1990, Carol Baldwin had a double mastectomy, her son said. Her lymph nodes also were removed.

About a year later, she called her sons home for Christmas, Daniel said. It was curious. She was in remission, Daniel said, so they wondered what it was about.

She announced she wanted to start a fund to find a cure for cancer. She also wanted to use their celebrity status to help raise money, Daniel Baldwin said.

Already, Carol had done some work with Susan G. Komen for the Cure, which also raises money for breast cancer research.

But she wanted to start her own fund. The siblings were a little skeptical, Daniel said. Their mom had no background in raising money and linking it to cancer research.

Instead, she got attention and money. Soon, the siblings were getting calls from friends saying their mom was on “Oprah” or “Regis and Kathie Lee” talking about her search for a cure.

She also made good on her idea to use the sons’ celebrity to raise money.

Carol Baldwin would think nothing of calling Daniel or another son on a Wednesday and instructing them to be in Detroit on Friday for the “underwater basket-weaving, hold your breath competition” to raise money, he said.

She wouldn’t take no for an answer, he said. So they showed up.

In recent years, Carol battled diabetes and had open-heart surgery resulting in a quadruple bypass, Daniel Baldwin said.

“She went through the wringer for about 15 years,” he said. “It was something every five years.”

The breast cancer research continues

In the last 20 years, the Carol M. Baldwin Breast Cancer Research Fund of CNY has provided more than 60 grants to support the research program at Upstate Medical University.

Each year, the fund awards multiple $50,000 grants to investigators conducting breast cancer research at SUNY Upstate Medical University and Upstate University Hospital in Syracuse. Support from the fund has led to more than $24 million in additional grant funding at Upstate.

In recent years, daughter Beth has run the fund, which continues to sponsor events and raise money. That work will continue, Daniel Baldwin said.

In addition to Daniel and Alec, Carol Baldwin is survived by two other sons, William and Stephen, and two daughters, Elizabeth Baldwin Keuchler and Jane Ann Baldwin Sasso. Carol Baldwin had 25 grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren.

“My mother taught me about second acts. And third ones, too,” Alec Baldwin wrote in an Instagram post. “She spent the last 25 years of her life as a fighter and a champion for the cause to which she devoted so much energy. We are all enormously proud of her accomplishments.”

Just a few months ago, some money from the Carol Baldwin fund paid for research at Upstate University Hospital that identified a gene that may help predict if breast cancer will metastasize, or spread to other parts of the body.

" … we can predict, with very high potential to be correct, whether this tumor metastasizes in the future,” said researcher Dr. Leszek Kotula at the time.

The study’s findings have the potential to improve the diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer.

Elizabeth Doran covers education, suburban government and development, breaking news and more. Got a tip, comment or story idea? Contact her anytime at 315-470-3012 or email edoran@syracuse.com

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