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"No problem," Jack answered. With practiced ease he stepped out next to the boys and smiled as the camera flashed. Back inside, he hurriedly downed two Subway sandwiches and a Coke—never once sitting—then headed for his next appointment: a booth where dozens of young families were lined up for autographs.

Local television crews soon arrived and began filming the almost-fifty-year-old zoo director emeritus, dressed in his usual khaki safari outfit and looking exactly like a "Jungle Jack" should look: muscular with an outdoorsman's tan and his hair—which Jack describes as "silver-streaked like a male gorilla"—hanging long and straight over his collar. This was Jack the public man.

It wasn't until I attended church with Jack and Suzi in Columbus—New Hope Reformed Church—and talked with Julie and their pastor, Steve Norden, that I saw another side of Jack Hanna—a husband, father, and Christian believer.

"When hard times strike a family," Norden told me, "family members tend to emerge either deeply embittered or deeply awed at the mystery of God. I've seen Jack and Suzi come through without the least amount of bitterness, with what I would call in Jack a 'quietly beckoned faith.'"

On June 17, 1995, Jack and Suzi stood around their dining room table with a half-dozen people from their church, holding hands and praying fervently with their twenty-year-old daughter Julie. The next morning Julie would undergo surgery to remove a tumor, the size of an orange, growing in her brain.

The tumor, the doctors believed, had formed as the result of an experimental treatment—a rarely used combination of high radiation and strong medication—that Julie had received when she was diagnosed with leukemia at two years of age. The treatments successfully stopped the leukemia.

Now, however, she was the twenty-fourth of those children who had received the experimental treatment to later develop a brain tumor; of those twenty-four, all but two were cancerous.

Another specific concern was that Julie's tumor was touching a delicate area in the brain—if damaged during surgery, it would leave Julie without the ability to communicate clearly—or worse. But if they didn't remove the tumor completely, it might continue to spread.

"As a father it was the worst feeling in the world," Jack remembers. "That night they were cutting off her hair, getting her ready. Suddenly nothing in life mattered anymore—all the possessions, all the television I do …"

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