You've laughed at Marty Cohan's jokes. But likely they were coming from the mouths of Bob Newhart or Mary Tyler Moore. In years of writing, directing and producing television shows, Cohan took the social upheavals of the '70s and '80s and mined them for comedy.
Martin Paul Cohan, '54, died May 19 at his home in Pacific Palisades, Calif., from large-cell lymphoma. He was 77.
He grew up in San Francisco, attended Lowell High School and pursued pre-law at Stanford. But the jobs he worked to put himself through school—at lumber mills, on the ocean liner Lurline—landed him in Stanford Hospital for back surgery. His sister, actress Rhoda Gemignani Miller, says he had a career epiphany while recovering and, upon his release, he marched over to the speech and drama department.
After graduation, Cohan headed to Los Angeles and climbed his way up from a page job at ABC Television. He got his break on Mary Tyler Moore and went on to write, direct and produce The Bob Newhart Show and write scripts for many other shows. He co-created Who's the Boss? and Silver Spoons. Cohan "gave me the expectation that TV producers were warm and kind and generous," wrote Mike Teverbaugh, who worked on Who's the Boss? "That not all of them were was hardly Marty's fault."
The quirky families and mismatched households of Cohan's shows sprang purely from his imagination, says his sister, who appeared on Who's the Boss? She remembers one exception: the peppery matriarch Ida Morgenstern on Mary Tyler Moore and Rhoda. "That was my mother."
In recent years, Cohan was passionate about politics—reading the newspaper every day and making calls for the Obama campaign—and enjoyed touring wineries along the coast with his family.
Survivors include his wife, Dawn Aldredge Cohan; his children Debbie Hydon and Steven Cohan; his sister; stepchildren Glenn Dungan and Diane Duncan; and one stepgrandson, Ryan Haake.
—Wendy Jalonen Fawthrop, '78
