Only two months into the New Year and America has already lost the lives of many entertainers, but a significant amount have died from some type of cancer.
Charles Garabedian: An award-winning artist who died of prostate cancer at 92. Garabedian was famous for incorporating Greek and Chinese symbolism in his works. Garabedian gave exhibitions of his paintings in the 1960s in Los Angeles and in the 1970s in New York.
Bayard Johnson: A notorious screenplay and scriptwriter who died of cancer at 63. Wrote screenplays of critically panned movies Tarzan and The Lost City and The Second Jungle Book: Mowgli and Baloo.
Dan Gerson: An award-winning writer from Pixar who died of brain cancer at 49. He wrote screenplays for award- winning films Big Hero 6, Monsters University and Monsters, Inc. He was an additional writer for other films such as Chicken Little, Meet the Robinsons and Cars.
Dan Hicks: The folk/jazz singer of Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks who died of liver cancer at 74. He was best known for his songs “I Scare Myself” and “Canned Music.”
Ray Colcord: An award-winning film and TV composer who died of pancreat- ic cancer at 66. He’s most known for orchestrating TV shows 227, The Facts of Life, Dinosaurs and Boy Meets World.
Joe Alaskey: A prolific voice actor who died of cancer at 63. Alternated voicing Looney Tunes characters Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Sylvester and Tweety with Jeff Bergman. He also voiced Grandpa Lou Pickles in Rugrats from 1997 on- ward.
Bob Elliott: Actor, comedian and father of comedian Chris Elliot, died of throat cancer at 92. One-half of the comedy duo Bob and Ray who famously satirized radio talk shows.
Peggy Anderson: A best-selling author who died from lung cancer at 77. She’s best known for her 1979 work Nurse, which profiled the work of a nurse, sell- ing millions of copies and spawning a movie and TV series.
Clarence Reid: A beloved rapper and R&B singer who died of liver cancer at 76. Known by the alternate persona “Blowfly,” famous for making songs with sexually explicit lyrics, the most famous being “Rapp Dirty.”
Francisco X. Alarcón: A Mexican American poet who died of cancer at 61. Received the American Book Award and the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award in 1993 possibly for his poems Snake Poems: An Aztec Invocation and Of Dark Love.
Dan Haggerty: A famous actor who died of spinal cancer at 73. He’s best known as “Grizzly Adams” in The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams movie and TV series.
Brad Fuller: An iconic video game composer who died of pancreatic cancer at 62. He composed soundtracks for the Atari games Blasteroids and Tengen Tetris, also engineered music for Atari port of Donkey Kong.
It’s unfortunate that such great people have been claimed by possibly the worlds deadliest disease.
The only way we could ever repay them for their influence on our lives is to keep them and their work alive.
