Brooke Anderson

July 12, 1943 - April 15, 2022

Brooke Anderson passed away at her home in San Francisco on Friday April 15, 2022. She was 78 and had pancreatic cancer. Her sister Brucie Foster and her niece Devon Foster were with her when she died. Brooke was born on July 12, 1943 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to George Ross Anderson and Helen Elizabeth Carson Anderson. In the 1960s Brooke was a volunteer for the Firesign Theatre at radio station KPFK-FM in Los Angeles. There, founder Peter Bergman introduced her to musician, composer, and record producer John Simon, whom she married in 1967. They relocated to near Woodstock, New York, from where John Simon produced numerous classic rock albums by Leonard Cohen, Janis Joplin, Gordon Lightfoot, The Band, and others.

After the marriage ended, Brooke returned to California to earn degrees in Science and Nursing from the College of Marin. She was working at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Hospital when San Francisco was an epicenter of the disease caused by the HIV retrovirus and later called AIDS. She finished her nursing career at Kaiser Permanente, where she worked on clinical trials for anti-retroviral medicines and became the Senior Clinical Research Coordinator. By the time she retired in 2016, Brooke had seen AIDS go from being a killer to being a chronic disease that could be managed.

Brooke was preceded in death by her mother and her aunt author Josephine Carson, by her father and her brothers Ross Peter Anderson II and Gary Webb Anderson. She is survived by three sisters, by nieces and nephews, and by numerous loving cousins and friends who will miss her musical voice and her grace, poise, and elegance.