Much-honored reporter for AP dies at Chicago home
Sharon Cohen, a matchless reporter who told American stories with great skill and compassion over more than four decades at The Associated Press, died Monday at her Chicago home. She was 68.
At her death, more than a year after she was diagnosed with brain cancer, Ms. Cohen was a national writer, a prestigious position she had held for 20 years. From her base in Chicago, she unreeled an array of stories about the triumphs and tragedies of people both ordinary and extraordinary.
There was the story of Vashti Risdall, the foster mother of 162 children who retired at age 96 only because her 74-year-old daughter insisted. Of Marine Sgt. Merlin German, the “Miracle Man” who survived a bomb blast in Iraq, dancing with his mom after 100 surgeries. Of barber Gilbert Peppin, who lived under a shadow for 30 years, unjustly suspected of his wife’s murder.
Every story got the Sharon Cohen treatment: determined reporting, zealous factchecking, direct and evocative writing. She knew no other way.
“Sharon’s genius was in capturing the stories of Americans as they lived out the intense changes and disruptions of the last 40 years — struggling when their town’s factory closed, trying to pull away from drugs or violence, bewildered when they came back from war,” said Sally Buzbee, the AP’s senior vice president and executive editor.
“Her stories often made me cry. They always opened our minds. As a reporter and writer, she was a dream — both utterly precise and dogged and also hugely compassionate.”
Ms. Cohen was an idea machine, never comfortable unless she had one story she was working on, another on deck and others in line. In the days before the internet, when she was a regional reporter covering the Midwest, Cohen subscribed to a score of small newspapers; she was always looking for that threeparagraph brief on page 38 that might turn into something special.
She gathered far more research than she could ever use, filling file cabinets throughout the Chicago bureau.
“You know the iceberg principle of writing, where most of the writer’s research and knowledge is below the surface?” said former AP editor John Dowling, a longtime friend and colleague. “The bottom of Sharon’s storyiceberg
was more like an Antarctic ice shelf.”
Ms. Cohen was a devoted daughter of Chicago. She never left it, aside from attending the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She worked for community newspapers, the suburban edition of the Chicago Tribune and United Press International before joining the AP in 1979.
She knew Chicago’s history and its neighborhoods, loved its rambunctious politics, railed against its corruption and greatly admired its hard-working people. She also felt that it was too often stereotyped.
And so she wrote about Urban Prep, an inner-city school that had the audacious goal of sending every member of the Class of 2010 to college — and succeeded. And one of her final stories, published last fall, was about Auburn Gresham, a neighborhood where people found hope despite their struggles with COVID-19, violent protests, gun violence and economic misery. “I’ve tried to explain and capture the lives and voices of people who aren’t in the headlines every day, because I think those are the most powerful stories,” she said in 2015 upon receiving a Studs Terkel Community Media Award for her life’s work.
Ms. Cohen received many other prizes, including the AP’s Gramling Journalism Award in 1999. She won countless Peter Lisagor Awards from the Chicago Headline Club; no one knows just how many.
Ms. Cohen loved to travel, was an avid reader and enjoyed photography. She is survived by Mike Robinson, a former AP staffer who was her partner for 40 years. She is also survived by her brother, Marshall Cohen, and his wife and two children. She was predeceased by her parents, David and Esther.