SILICON VALLEY/SAN JOSE BUSINESS JOURNAL- Most employee handbooks set out how many vacation days are earned a year, how many personal days and how many sick days. That's by the book. But what happens when valued employees are hit with a devastating personal crisis?

For Kathleen King and her husband Mark Stark, it wasn't a theoretical exercise when son Robert was born in 1996.

"My youngest child has a very rare syndrome," says Ms. King. "There are only 240 cases in the world of alpha mannosidosis."



The defect leaves the child without an enzyme which in healthy people helps rid the body's cells of toxins and waste. Without it, the body poisons itself.

"It affects mental ability, joints, hearing, bone structure and balance. It includes almost everything you can imagine," Ms. King says.

When Robert and his healthy twin were born, she was a top sales person for Applied Materials, Inc., of Santa Clara, where her husband, Mark Stark, now a vice president, also worked.

The child needed frequent hospitalization as doctors tried to find the cause of the malady. Add in the Kings' efforts to take their son to experts across the country and their working hours were riddled with absences.

Applied Materials worked with Ms. King and Mr. Stark, going beyond the employee manual in trying to arrange work schedules to accommodate both parents.

When the child had to be hospitalized for treatments -he had 18 operations in his first few years of life -one parent stayed bedside while the other was at the family's Saratoga home looking after their four other children.

While it must have played havoc with day-to-day business issues, Applied doesn't see it that way.

"These kind of circumstances don't come along every day. It's out of the norm, so your response is out of the norm," says Mike O'Farrell, Applied Materials' vice president for Global Community Affairs. "The last thing you want to do is pull a critical support structure out from under a person. You've just got to let them get their life in order and get beyond worrying about their job."

That's the way it should be, says Deborah Rhode, director of Stanford University's Center on Ethics.

"It's in the employer's long term interest to make these accommodations," she says. "You build up enormous goodwill, not just with the employee but all workers who see what you're doing."

Applied went the extra mile.

"The rules clearly do not require Applied Materials to provide extra assistance to the Kings. They did so simply because it was the right thing to do. Through its actions, Applied becomes a great role model for other companies striving to do the right thing," says Christopher Meyers, director of the Kegley Institute of Ethics at California State University, Bakersfield.

Stanford's Ms. Rhode, who is not familiar with Ms. King's specific case, says companies tend to be more agreeable to making extraordinary efforts for employees when the worker has long tenure, is in a key position, or where recruiting and training a replacement would be a significant cost.

"This is one [area] where ethics pays and virtue is not its only reward," she says.

Robert was taken to specialists throughout the country before his ailment was diagnosed by doctors at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles as alpha mannosidosis.



"He was four at the time, which means a lot of damage was done by the time he was diagnosed," Ms. King says.

And then came treatments specifically aimed at the affliction -- bone marrow transplants among them. He went through one of the painful transplants and while it seemed to work, the donor's bone marrow did not function properly in the boy's body.

"He had to go in again," says Ms. King. "The donor had agreed to give again. Unrelated. A policeman in New Jersey. My son is Robert, he is Bob. He's a twin, my son's a twin. He has three sons; I have three sons.

"Bob agreed to give again but that time it was really bad.," she says. Her son stopped breathing and came close to death.

"He made his way out of it and that was kind of the turning point," she says. Ms. King and her husband decided that they wanted to do something that changes the world as much as work.

"I had been working on an effort to start a children's hospital in San Jose," Ms. King says. In addition, with her son on the mend, she saw serving in city government in Saratoga as another way to give back.

"I thought city government and trying to start a children's hospital were surprisingly complementary involvements. The same kind of people involved in government get involved in whether a children's hospital starts. It was a really good combination," she says.

Applied extended a leave of absence to allow her to work more intensely on the proposed children's hospital, forming the group Silicon Valley Children's Hospital Foundation.

"I wanted to treat this ... just as a business opportunity," she says.

Applied Materials stepped up again, paying for a needs assessment, data gathering, a business plan and more. "They said it was kind of like an incubator for a product and we're going to do it in the philanthropy area, too," she says. "In a way, it's like still being part of Applied Materials. They've not only backed it with funding, they've backed it with their skill, their knowledge, their support."

Efforts to build a children's hospital in the South Bay have not ended but are in a quieter period now, says Ms. King.

"When she sets her mind to it, 'driven' is the adjective I would use ... like to the 'nth power,'" says Applied's Mr. O'Farrell. "She doesn't let anything stand in her way."
Ms. King is serving a one-year term as mayor of Saratoga, a largely ceremonial position rotated among city council members. She first ran for council in 2002 after her son was on the mend.

"For some people, difficulties divide them. For us, it's pulled us tighter together," says Ms. King of her marriage and family.

In the past several years life has settled into one of fewer crisis. Ms. King left Applied in January after nearly 25 years, and is devoting her time to family, civic duties and efforts to promote the children's hospital.

"Robert is in a severely handicapped class in the Cambrian school district. He has always been about the happiest kid you could ever meet," she says. "He's more like a two-and-a-half-year-old than an eight-year-old. It was hard to put him into a severely handicapped class because that was accepting that there were differences. But his teacher says he's making progress"

Doctors have declined to offer predictions for the boy's future since the syndrome is so rare. One expert says there are probably more scientists working on alpha mannosidosis than there are people afflicted with it. "So we just play it as it comes," she says.

By any measure, it's been a tough eight years on the King family, something Ms. King quickly agrees to, but then adds, "How lucky. How much luckier could we have been? One out of every five children that goes through a bone marrow transplant dies. We knew some of them very closely by the time they died. We were one of the fortunate few that not only went through it once but made it through a second time, which is a lot harder. The second time they have to hit them really hard with the radiation as well as the chemo. They hit them really hard because they aren't going to try a third time. That's it."

Douglas E. Caldwell is associate editor of the Business Journal. Reach him at (408) 299-1835.

Photographs by Dennis Hendricks

back to top