LIVERMORE — Les Mahler, a longtime Bay Area journalist who became an outspoken activist against children’s cancer, died Thursday. He was 69.
An exact cause of death was not immediately available. In a September 2018 opinion essay for Las Positas College’s student newspaper, Mahler said he had been diagnosed with adenoid cystic carcinoma, an extremely rare form of cancer, in October of 2007. In a call to this news organization last month, he said it had recently metastasized to his spine.
Mahler attended John F. Kennedy High School in Fremont before graduating from Amador Valley High School in Pleasanton, as well as Ohlone College and San Jose State University, and later served a variety of roles at Las Positas, including stints as a mass communications advisory board member and sports public information officer.
He began a nearly four-decade career in journalism as an education correspondent for the San Jose Mercury News, and later spent time as a copy editor and copy chief with the then-ANG Newspapers in Pleasanton, and the San Francisco Examiner and as a correspondent covering the San Joaquin County Board of Supervisors for a local news service.
But he threw himself most wholeheartedly into activism, writing two children’s books, “A Hole In His Socks” and “Blueberry Raindrops,” and founding Stomp Out Kids Cancer as a charitable community organization that sponsored yearly fund-raisers with a Lodi winery and hosted days out with picnics, horseback riding and donated sporting-event tickets, all to lift young patients’ spirits.
In a 2014 People Magazine article, Mahler told Bay Area journalist Susan Young about his cancer-fighting efforts, saying he continued to consider himself fortunate despite a terminal diagnosis.
“I know what I’m going to die of and about when it’s going to happen,” he said at the time.
“It’s not like someone who just suddenly dies. That person didn’t get a chance to say good-bye to their loved ones, and didn’t get a chance to live every day of their life appreciating each day as a gift.”
Funeral service arrangements are pending.
Contact George Kelly at 408-859-5180.