Grant DePorter’s Cancer Battle Fuels A Chicago-Style Comeback Through Gilda’s Club

In a city that measures resilience the way it measures winters, long and unforgiving, Grant DePorter’s story lands with weight.

The CEO of Harry Caray’s Restaurant Group has spent a lifetime building institutions rooted in Chicago tradition. But his most defining chapter didn’t happen in a dining room or ballpark. It unfolded in hospital corridors, in the quiet, uncertain hours of a fight against T-cell lymphoma, a rare and aggressive blood cancer that tested everything.

Six months of chemotherapy. A stem cell transplant. Blood clots. Kidney failure. The kind of medical gauntlet that strips life down to its bare essentials.

And yet, DePorter doesn’t tell it like a tragedy. He tells it like a relay, where survival is only the first leg and giving back is the finish line.

That perspective is exactly why Gilda’s Club Chicago will honor DePorter at its 28th Annual Awards Dinner at the Radisson Blu Aqua Hotel, alongside Chicago native and caregiver icon Bonnie Hunt and her family. The organization, a lifeline for those impacted by cancer, has become central to DePorter’s story, not just as a resource but as a community that carried him through.

His connection to Gilda’s Club started in 2014, when his wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. Years later, when his own diagnosis hit, the organization became something deeper. Not just a place for support, but a place where fear gets translated into shared language.

“You talk to people who’ve already been through it,” DePorter has said. “That creates a community. And that’s everything when you’re in it.”

Gilda’s Club Chicago has quietly built one of the city’s most essential support systems, offering free emotional and social services to cancer patients and their families. It’s not just therapy or resources. It’s connection. It’s the ability to walk into a room and not have to explain the unexplainable.

For DePorter, that network extended beyond his own recovery. His openness has created a ripple effect, with others reaching out, looking for guidance, or just a voice that understands. Survival, in his world, isn’t a solo act. It’s communal.

But DePorter’s story doesn’t exist in isolation. It’s stitched into the larger fabric of Chicago, a city where legacy and neighborhood pride tend to run deep.

Raised in Park Ridge, DePorter shares hometown roots with Bonnie Hunt, who built her own legacy not just as an actress but as a cancer nurse who stepped directly into the lives of patients. Their parallel paths converge at this moment, a reminder that Chicago often operates like a small town hiding inside a big one.

His family’s imprint on the city is equally tangible. His father, Donald J. DePorter, founded Chicago Gateway Green in 1986, transforming neglected expressways into green corridors lined with trees and public art. It was a vision of a cleaner, more welcoming Chicago, one that didn’t ignore its rough edges but worked to soften them.

That same philosophy echoes in Grant’s approach today.

Whether it’s preserving pieces of baseball history, like artifacts tied to the 1919 White Sox, or championing organizations that support vulnerable communities, DePorter operates with a sense that Chicago’s identity is something to be protected and passed forward.

And then there’s sports. Always sports.

From Harry Caray’s iconic seventh-inning stretch to the city’s long memory of curses, comebacks, and heartbreaks, DePorter understands that Chicago’s teams are more than entertainment. They’re emotional infrastructure. They bind strangers, define eras, and give the city a shared language.

It’s no accident that his professional life lives at that intersection of hospitality and fandom. Restaurants, like stadiums, are gathering places. They’re where stories get told, retold, and occasionally exaggerated into legend.

The upcoming Gilda’s Club Awards Dinner isn’t just another gala. It’s a reflection of Chicago at its best, where business leaders, caregivers, survivors, and neighbors converge not for spectacle, but for purpose.

Bonnie Hunt will receive the Hunt Family Award, honoring her deeply personal work caring for cancer patients long before she became a household name. DePorter will be recognized not just for surviving, but for what he’s done with that survival.

Because in Chicago, endurance alone isn’t the headline. What you build afterward is.

And what DePorter has built is a reminder that even in a city known for its toughness, there’s an equally powerful undercurrent of compassion. It shows up in support groups, in neighborhood projects, in small acts that rarely make news but quietly shape lives.

Cancer has a way of shrinking the world. Gilda’s Club, and people like DePorter, expand it again.

His story is less about beating something and more about joining something. A community. A cause. A city that, for all its noise and grit, still knows how to show up when it matters most.

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