"When I started on the board all those years ago, we had a hard time finding anybody …who could say he or she was a survivor."

In her 35-plus years with the American Cancer Society (ACS), volunteer Mary Margaret Moorhead has witnessed many of the organization's milestones.

Most recently she celebrated with thousands of survivors and volunteers at the ACS Relay For Life Celebration on the Hill on Sept. 19. Moorhead attended as an ambassador.

Though she downplays her own cancer experience — basal cell carcinoma — she cares deeply for others facing cancer and is a tireless advocate on their behalf. The role of ambassador was a perfect fit.

She first heard about Celebration on the Hill while attending the ACS national assembly meeting in California last year. Volunteer and first-year assembly member Phylecia Wilson told her about an opportunity to meet with members of Congress in Washington, DC.

"I was supposed to be her mentor, she turned out to be mine," Moorhead said. When she returned home she told a staff person she worked with "I would just love to be a part of that."

"I think they finally thought, well, we better let her go," she said.

Moorheard said she was reluctant to walk in the survivors lap at the Celebration's Relay For Life. "There are so many people who have things so much worse," she said. "I never felt I could be considered a survivor when I've dealt with something that could be taken care of as easily as it was."

When Moorhead first came to the ACS, it wasn't because she had cancer. She joined the local unit because they needed people, she said, and because she thought it was a good cause.

Later, though, the cancer came. She lost a niece to pancreatic cancer. Her niece's two sisters both had breast cancer, but survived. The nieces' mother, Moorhead's sister in law, died from a brain tumor.

"We've had our share of cancer in the family," she said. "And, you know, you don't get to my age without losing lots of people you love with cancer."

This has made her volunteer work even more important, she said.

In her years with the ACS, spent in Versailles, Ind., Moorhead has seen "so much change and discovery."

The surgeon general's report linking smoking to cancer, the use of bone marrow transplant to treat cancer, tamoxifen to treat — and later to prevent — breast cancer; the beginning of the Great American Smokeout and Relay For Life, and the sequencing of DNA are just a few of them, she said.

She even remembers when it was hard to find survivors.

She recalled a dinner honoring survivors in 1968. Every unit in the state was invited. "We were all supposed to bring a survivor to a dinner in Indianapolis. And you just could not believe how few people there were. We had to really search to find one survivor at that point. In the last 35 years, we have come a long way."

Moorhead has served in almost every capacity on the board in Ripley County, has been an Indiana Division (now called Great Lakes) board delegate, and was chairman of that board from 1988 to 1990. She was a representative from her division on the national board.

When Gordon Klatt, MD, whose 24-hour walk around a Tacoma, Wash., track became Relay For Life, proposed the idea to the national board, she was one of the members who voted to make it a signature event.

She has served on the Indianapolis Hope Lodge board of directors since the lodge was built. "I do believe it is one of our greatest services to the cancer patient and his or her caregiver," she said.

And she can recall the beginning of Relay For Life in her own community. Hundreds now participate. "We've probably quadrupled within these last seven or eight years.

"There's so many things [the ACS] can do that we probably never thought we would even need to do," she said. "I've seen so much increase in service and in research. I know we've got a long way to go, though.

"I have enjoyed every, every bit of my experience with the ACS," she said. "Change. Discovery. All those things. All good things."