April 10, 2015

Judy Cohn

Judy Cohn was born in 1935 in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up in Manhattan Beach, living across the street from Sheepshead Bay, where the family kept a boat. She remembered World War Two vividly, including watching her father, who served as a security guard, pace by the water during an air raid, near a Coast Guard base that watched the boats coming in from the Atlantic. Her father worked for many years for Gregg Publishing Company and later ran his own business making spiral notebooks before running college bookstores at Hunter College; after his death at 54, her mother ran the Hunter store for ten years. Her mother, a Hunter College graduate and teacher, also produced Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. Her maternal grandparents came from Russia and settled in Williamsburg, where her grandfather owned a shoe store, and her paternal grandmother came from Poland.

Judy graduated from Abraham Lincoln High School in three and a half years, accompanying Neil Sedaka on piano at her graduation. She attended NYU for a year before transferring to Brooklyn College, where she earned a degree in secretarial studies. One summer she worked as a counselor at a Catskills resort called Napanoch, where she met Norman, a waiter, and the two decided to marry almost immediately. They wed in 1956 and settled in Brooklyn, later moving to New Jersey. Norman worked in merchandising and later in the children's clothing industry. While in New Jersey, Judy launched a creative business with a friend, developing planters made with colored sands and cactus, selling to stores including Bloomingdale's and Stearns. In 1974, during a recession, a job opportunity in Dallas brought the family, with three children, to Texas.

Coming from a Jewish neighborhood steeped in New York's cultural life, where she had studied piano and dance at places like Carnegie Hall's Ballet Arts and the Metropolitan Opera House, Judy found Dallas a culture shock. The family settled in Northwood Hills for the Richardson schools. Seeking something to do, she began working at the JCC preschool, eventually teaching kindergarten and serving as music specialist. She built a private piano studio, then returned to school at UTD for a degree in arts administration, completing internships with the Dallas Children's Theatre, the Dallas Opera, and the Richardson Symphony, where she became executive director and took the orchestra to a sold-out concert at the Meyerson. She later returned to the JCC as cultural programs director, and considered the Jewish Arts Festival at the Meyerson her greatest accomplishment. She and Norman raised three children and had six grandchildren, to whom she offered simple advice: be a good, giving, kind person and a good listener.

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