By Julie Bacanskas

It was a day the Hill family never saw coming.

The year was 1969, and Eagles tight end Fred Hill had sustained a knee injury during a game against the Detroit Lions. Hill walked in the front door of his house in Cherry Hill, New Jersey with his leg in a cast and was greeted by his wife, Fran.

Philadelphia Eagles TE Fred Hill

The heartbreaking news she shared with him moments later made him forget all about his injury. Their 3-year-old daughter, Kim, had been diagnosed with acute lymphatic leukemia. Doctors estimated she had six months to live.

While the Hills dealt with every parent’s worst nightmare, they never could have imagined the miracle that would emerge from their daughter’s battle with cancer – a partnership between the Eagles and McDonald’s that led to the creation of the world’s first Ronald McDonald House right here in Philadelphia.

The original six-month timeline doctors gave Kim proved to be wrong. She spent three and a half years fighting and receiving treatment at St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children. It was a long, grueling process that weighed heavily on her and her family.

“My wife slept on a little couch by the bed and she wouldn’t leave,” Hill says now from his California home. “I don’t know how she did it, but my wife drove every day to St. Christopher’s for Kim’s chemotherapy. The protocol was five days a week you got injections – back then you had to do sticks every day because they didn’t have what they call a port where they can just leave it in – and spinal taps and bone marrows. The next week it would be just one day. Then the next week, a full regimen five days a week.”

As his daughter underwent treatment, Hill chose to retire from football in 1971. The Eagles, though, wanted to stay involved, and when Hill approached then-owner Leonard Tose about a fashion show fundraiser a year later, the team was all in.