The Boys of Bonanza

Bonanza made its TV debut in 1959 and was a smash hit for fourteen years, ranking only second as the most popular western of all time after Gunsmoke.  The story centered on a father raising three sons on the Ponderosa ranch, a huge spread on the shores of Lake Tahoe in Nevada.  Ben Cartwright, the father, was Lorne Greene:  He died from an ulcer at age seventy-two in 1987.  Two of the three sons died young:  The middle son, Hoss, played by Dan Blocker, a 6-foot-3, 300 pound, good natured guy on and off screen died in 1972 at age forty-three of a pulmonary embolism after routine gall bladder surgery.  The youngest son, Little Joe, played by Michael Landon, later went on to star in Little House on the Prairie and Highway to Heaven.  Landon died at age fifty-four in 1991 of pancreatic cancer.  Married three times, with nine children, he is remembered most for how he publicly faced news of his fatal illness with an unusual frankness.  Blocker’s type of embolism and Landon’s cancer are often caused by exposure to chemicals, frequently from too much contact with butoxyethanol, a chemical in many household cleaning products.  It seems likely that both actors breathed air or had skin contact with the chemical while on the set of Bonanza. The family cook, Chinese immigrant Hop Sing, played by Victor Sen Yung also died from exposure to chemicals, this time from his real-life kitchen:  He died in 1980 at age sixty-five due to carbon-monoxide poisoning, stemming from a gas leak in a household appliance.