Author/illustrator Guy Gilchrist visits St. Jude
With a few deft strokes, the familiar face of Miss Piggy appeared on the paper, delighting the children gathered in front of the easel at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.
“You’re good,” said one boy, as he watched author and illustrator Guy Gilchrist wield his marker.
“Oh, you can be, too," Gilchrist replied with a smile, "if you practice as much as I do."
Gilchrist is writer and illustrator of more than 40 children’s books and is the cartoonist for comic strips Nancy®, Today’s Dog, Jim Henson’s The Muppets and Your Angels Speak. The long-time St. Jude supporter traveled to the hospital in April to hold a special drawing workshop for patients and siblings, and bring a little artistic joy to patient families.
“I love St. Jude,” he said following the visit, his second to the hospital but the first where he had the opportunity to share his talents directly with patients and meet their families.
Gilchrist’s involvement with St. Jude goes back to his youth, when he raised money for the hospital as part of a radio station-sponsored contest in West Hartford, Connecticut. As the top fundraiser, Gilchrist, along with several other children, was invited to the station where St. Jude founder Danny Thomas congratulated them via speaker phone.
“I was in total shock. That was Danny Thomas talking to us and I’m just 10 years old,” said Gilchrist. “That really started my lifelong love affair with St. Jude.”
As an adult, when a Connecticut station became a part of the Country Cares for St. Jude Kids® program, Gilchrist was there, drawing caricatures for donors who signed on as Partners In Hope® during the annual radiothons. He also mailed out his drawings of angels to donors and participated in Cadillac Ranch benefits for St. Jude in Southington, Connecticut.
And when his own daughter faced several surgeries in a life-threatening situation, he learned first-hand of the darkness families can face and the importance of finding some respite from those fears.
“I slept on the floor. I slept at the hospital. We put our lives on hold and our hopes in the hands of God,” he said. “Let me tell you something: all I do is tell stories and draw pictures. If anything I do gets the parent or the child to just stop thinking about what’s in front of them for a minute, I can never do this enough.”
With his Western-style shirts and ever-present cowboy hat, Gilchrist appears to be more country music artist than cartoonist and children’s book author. It turns out that he’s both, having written songs for and/or performed with Charlie Daniels, Dion, Jett Williams and the Marshall Tucker Band, among others “I didn’t know if I was going to be a writer and doing it with pictures or be a writer and doing it with music,” he said.
As it happens, the week he went to work for Jim Henson drawing The Muppets comic strip, one of his songs broke the Billboard charts. Since then, his work has been featured in newspapers and museums worldwide with pieces from his Muppets artwork selected as part of the permanent collection in the Smithsonian Institution. Gilchrist serves on the Board of Directors of the Newspaper Features Council and is a member of the National Cartoonists Society and The Artists and Writers Group. But it is the ability to use his talent to make children like St. Jude patient Anna smile that is closest to Gilchrist’s heart.
“Someone had given (Anna) a coloring book of princesses and there was one of the Princess Aurora. So I drew Anna and Aurora as princesses and gave it to her. Her mom just flipped out and Anna was just so happy," he said. "To get the opportunity to sit there and do that is way more important to me than anything else I can do. Sometimes it does feel like the reason I got to draw is so I get the free pass to come in and hang with that kind of magic.”
May 2010
