Cannon leaning on brother in time of difficulty — again

MAPLETON — Joe and Chris Cannon stood with their feet spread apart, hands on the car as the Cedar City police officer checked the IDs of their three traveling companions.

Today, such a scene could sink the political and business careers of the powerful Cannon brothers, but this was the summer of 1963. Joe was 13, Chris, 12.

They had done nothing wrong but wound up in a jail cell for safekeeping. As they whiled away that long, strange night, the California boys could not imagine they would return to Utah to build careers, raise families and become famous. And they couldn't know the incident foreshadowed lives filled with ambition and controversy.

Now, 41 years later, four-term Congressman Chris Cannon and his older brother Joe, attorney and chairman of Utah's Republican Party, are again leaning on each other for support as Chris runs for re-election to the 3rd Congressional District while his daughter faces a serious battle with cancer.

"The last month has been very difficult," Chris Cannon conceded. He skipped most of the fall session of Congress to stay with his family and determine treatment for his daughter, who at 25 is fighting a recurrence of the disease that first attacked her in 2001.

"With this health crisis, Joe and my whole family have been very, very good," Cannon said. "But Joe has been there on many occasions when I've really needed him. He's been a matter of comfort to me, and serious comfort for my kids and my wife as well. It's been great to have that relationship back in a time of difficulty."

He said there are no conventional treatments for his daughter's cancer, but as he familiarized himself with terms like antigens and lymphocytes, he has found hope.

"If you had told me a month ago I would spend the time on this I have, I couldn't have believed it. It's a literally astonishing problem that people only get sensitive to when they go through it."

In fact, he's become critical of the cancer research bureaucracy and its practices. If re-elected, he'll attack the system.

"There is a consensus on the problems but no consensus on what to do," he said. "We're going to step in and try to do something to solve it. The hope for my daughter is stuff funded by other industries only peripherally related to cancer research. It's in entrepreneurial research industries. We need a much better bang for the buck. The hope for cancer victims is in changing the way we do our research."

While Cannon's staff has worked through his absence — three of Cannon's bills passed during the session while he remained in Utah — he is grateful to his Democratic opponent Beau Babka "for his gracious attitude."

"Beau Babka has said he understands, and he's not pressured us for debates," Cannon said. "We'll do debates later this month, but you can be obnoxious about that, demanding debates when I'm in session or . . . ," he paused, tellingly, "things. I've found my opponent is a very nice, thoughtful, kind person."

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