Photo: St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital Volunteer of the Year Chaz Corzine poses for a portrait on Monday, June 22, 2026, in Nashville, Tenn. Corzine © USA TODAY Network/Reuters Connect
St. Jude Saved His Daughter’s Life, so a Music Row Exec Gave Back Big
Her worst day in kindergarten was the day the teacher made her pull her apple off the board.
In front of all the other kids.
Each child had three construction-paper apples next to their name, one green, one yellow and one red. If a student misbehaved, the teacher would have the little offender walk up and remove one.
Mallory Achterbosch, 29 years later, still remembers tears stinging her eyes and her face burning red. And she still remembers being confused about why she was being punished. After nap time ended, why were all the other kids at their desks and she was still on her mat on the floor?
Neither she nor her teacher knew then that Achterbosch was having absence seizures, meaning she would freeze for up to a minute and have no memory or awareness of that time. No one knew then that a brain tumor caused those seizures and nausea so severe that the girl sometimes vomited.
“All of a sudden, I was lost and confused,” she said, “and the seizures also made me sick to my stomach.”
No one knew she’d have as many as nine seizures a day. No one knew that Nashville doctors would say they could do little to stop them.
And no one knew that four years later, one of the girl’s best days would come when surgeons at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis removed the brain tumor, ending her seizures.
Her father, longtime music industry executive Chaz Corzine, had been a St. Jude supporter for decades. After his daughter’s surgery, Corzine became a champion, regularly urging Music Row’s stars and staffers to donate to the nonprofit.
On June 24, Corzine is set to receive the national St. Jude Ambassador of the Year award at a private dinner in Memphis.
“To whom much is given, much is expected,” Corzine said, quoting the New Testament. “I was given a gift I can never repay. But I get great joy out of trying.”
‘Is my little girl going to die?’
When she was 2, the little smiling redhead climbed up everything: trees, playground equipment, door jambs in the house.
“There were many times Chaz and I would be walking around the house trying to find her,” the girl’s mom, Deaver Corzine, said, “and she’d be up on top of a door frame. We’d be walking right underneath her.”
Achterbosch said there were several advantages to climbing. She enjoyed the solitude of being up in a tree and she could get to the candy her big brother hid on top of the kitchen cabinets.
She loved climbing, she loved hugging people, she loved gymnastics and dancing and she loved learning. After her parents read stories to her for several months, Achterbosch started to pull the books off the shelf and taught herself to read before she started kindergarten.
Within months of starting kindergarten at Christ Presbyterian Academy, though, the girl started having daily bouts of severe nausea. Sometimes she threw up. The attacks always left her exhausted for several minutes.
Doctors tested her for stomach issues for months. Ulcers? Acid reflux? Allergies? Nothing. A pediatrician eventually decided to order an MRI of the girl’s brain.
A few days later, Chaz Corzine’s wife, crying, called him at the office. The doctor called, she said, and told me Mallory has a brain tumor. I’m packing a bag and we’re going to the hospital right now.
“I was scared to death,” Corzine said. “My mind went to, is my little girl going to die?”
For the next four years, the girl regularly went to Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt for blood work and for scans with IVs for iodine-based contrast. Nurses usually had a tough time finding a vein.
The girl dreaded each visit.
“They were doing a lot of construction around the hospital then,” Achterbosch said, “and as soon as I saw cranes, the fear and panic would kick in.”
She continued to have an average of nine seizures a day, which started to affect her grades and her relationships with her classmates. Things got really bad in third grade.
Some girls, uncomfortable around Achterbosch’s freezing episodes, told her not to sit with them at recess. One of Achterbosch’s friends got teased for hanging out with her. During one seizure, a teacher picked her up and shook her to try to snap her out of it.
The girl who loved learning started to hate school.
She would spend hours crying on top of a pile of her stuffed animals in her closet.
A pile of pancakes
His star client at the time, iconic recording artist Amy Grant, actively supported St. Jude, known for providing free, cutting-edge treatment for pediatric cancer and other life-threatening childhood diseases.
So Corzine served on the St. Jude advisory board, and he sometimes shared his frustration around treatment in Nashville for his daughter’s brain tumor before and after those meetings.
In the midst of that, Marlo Thomas, star of 1960s sitcom “That Girl” and the leading public face for St. Jude, motioned for Corzine to meet her in the hallway outside a meeting.
The actress grabbed his hands, told him she knew about his daughter’s struggles and pledged that St. Jude would take care of her and that she would be OK. Corzine cried, moved by her compassionate, hopeful message.
A Nashville doctor suggested the family take a one-year break from scans and evaluations, saying there was nothing more to be done to try to stop the seizures.
Within weeks, St. Jude did an MRI, said the brain tumor was growing and told the Corzines the tumor needed to be cut out as soon as possible.
Scared? Nope. Thrilled.
“I could not have been more excited,” Achterbosch said. “That was the first time I was being met with a solution. I remember thinking, I’m going to normal, I won’t have seizures anymore and I get to be with my friends.”
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The doctors, nurses and other hospital staffers explained everything beforehand, showed her the equipment, let her pick out the scent of her anesthesia. (She went with orange, which proved to be too strong and burned her nose a little.)
On the day of the surgery, she clutched a stuffed doggy that Amy Grant gave her. (Achterbosch named the dog Scooter after taking a pre-op carriage ride with her parents and the driver’s dog, Scooter, on either side of her.)
The girl woke up starving. She asked again and again for pancakes. The nurse said again and again that pancakes would make her throw up. The girl persisted. The nurse relented. Achterbosch ate five pancakes, enjoyed every bite and never got sick.
Each year, in person or virtually, Achterbosch and her parents eat pancakes together.
The girl went home a few days later. The seizures stopped.
After begging her parents to allow it, she went back to school a few weeks later. Shortly after that, she started playing soccer.
“The ball heads her way and she jumps up and heads it,” Corzine said. “We all held our breath, but she was good.”
‘Healing for my heart’
Each time she went back to St. Jude for a checkup after surgery, the girl brought her allowance and birthday money to donate to the hospital.
“I’d say, ‘Mallory, you don’t have to give all your money away!'” her mother said.
Father and daughter have become active advocates and fundraisers for St. Jude, making several joint appearances, sponsoring teams for fundraiser walks and thanking the hospital team for saving Achterbosch’s life.
“When I left St. Jude,” Achterbosch once said at a Nashville fundraiser, “my parents didn’t owe them a penny, but I owed them my life.”
Achterbosch, married and living in Huntsville, Alabama, now has her own little girl, Eliza, who’s 3.
Corzine has served on several St. Jude boards and committees and has tapped into celebrity connections to come up with unique auctions. He once sold a bunch of his tour jackets he’d collected from years of working with Grant and Michael W. Smith. In 2023, Corzine collected autographed hats, ballcaps and bandanas from celebs like Michael Jackson, Willie Nelson and rocker Slash to sell.
“I’ve never been in a position to write the check I wish I could write. So you do it in other ways,” he said. “It’s fun to be creative with how I raise money for St. Jude. And it’s an honor.”
The president of St. Jude’s fundraising arm, American Lebanese Syrian Associated Charities, called Corzine “a true champion” for the hospital.
“[Chaz] has mobilized hundreds of supporters in the pursuit of finding cures for childhood cancer,” ALSAC president Ike Anand said in a statement.
“Through his steadfast commitment, Chaz helps ensure families never receive a bill from St. Jude for treatment, travel, housing, or food, so they can focus on helping their child live.”
The Corzines said fundraising for St. Jude lets them find purpose in the pain they endured.
“To be able to help someone else going through it makes you feel you didn’t go through it for nothing,” Deaver Corzine said. “It’s healing for my heart.”
Reach Brad Schmitt at brad@tennessean.com.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: St. Jude saved his daughter’s life, so a Music Row exec gave back big
Reporting by Brad Schmitt, Nashville Tennessean / Nashville Tennessean
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
