Imagine you're a teenage girl in the early 2000s and the phone rings. The landline, obviously, because you don't have a cellphone yet, or if you do, it's the kind where you drop it and the battery falls out and flies across the room.
Anyway, you answer and say "hello" with a mouth full of chips, only because no one is using the dial-up internet at the moment, and it's Bob Saget.
That's what happened to Julie Wigley of Baltimore, Maryland, when she was about 15. Julie recently shared the experience in a Facebook post, writing, "High school Julie had a mini freak out- my TV dad knows my real dad?!"
But it wasn't just a one-off phone call with a celebrity. That call started a decades-long friendship between Julie's dad, Dr. Frederick Wigley, and Bob. Over the years, Julie would talk to Bob herself several times, even meeting him in person. The reason for the special relationship between Bob and her dad was Bob's most important passion project.
A lot of people don't know this about Bob Saget, but his sister died from an incurable disease called scleroderma. In an essay the comedian once wrote for Today, he described it as "an incurable chronic disease which means 'hard skin.' In some patients scarring forms in the lungs and on the skin, changing a person’s appearance. In other patients, the blood vessels are predominantly affected, leading to profound loss of lung function over an extended period of time."
Incidentally, Bob had always had an interest in fundraising for this particular illness, even before his sister was diagnosed. He had begun performing at the Cool Comedy • Hot Cuisine annual event years before. That's how he came to contact Julie's dad, a professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins who specializes in rheumatology and scleroderma, in the first place.
"They got connected through one of my dad's patients — who ran a comedy event called Cool Comedy • Hot Cuisine," she told LittleThings.
Throughout the years, the men spoke often, and Bob was relentless in trying to find a cure for the illness, Julie shared. She said they spoke just a few weeks before the actor's untimely death.
For Julie, now 34, a few moments stand out. "One of the most memorable times was my dad was doing an interview on the Today show with him. … I was walking to class in college and called my dad to say that he did a good job with the interview — he handed the phone to Bob, who basically sang my dad's praises to me for 10 minutes," she recalled. "He was so grateful and respectful to the doctors trying to find a cure."
She also met Bob in person. That experience was even more memorable. Mainly, it felt special because of how kindhearted and down to earth he was.
"When I met him in person — it was at one of his comedy shows — he acted as if we were longtime friends," Julie said. "I didn’t feel like I was meeting a celebrity at all."
"Makes you think how quickly life can change," Julie wrote on Facebook. "RIP TV Dad." But for Julie, the loss of the actor and comedian hits hard because she knew he wasn't just all of our TV dads. He was a real man who suffered a devastating loss — and who genuinely wanted to help people.
While the comedian and humanitarian's life ended far too soon, there are few better ways to remembered.
