Joan Ganz Cooney

Joan Ganz Cooney was born Joan Ganz on November 30, 1929, in Phoenix, Arizona. Her father, Sylvan Ganz, worked as a banker; her mother, Pauline Reddon, was a homemaker. Her grandfather Emil Ganz, a German immigrant from Walldorf, Thuringia, arrived in the U.S. in 1858 and later became president of the First National Bank of Arizona and a three-term mayor of Phoenix. She was the youngest of three children and described her upbringing as upper-middle-class and country-club-oriented, raised with the expectation that she would marry around age twenty-five after a brief, interesting job.

Cooney attended North High School in Phoenix, where she performed in school plays. She credited her teacher Bud Brown as a major influence; his lectures on civil rights, poverty, free press, and antisemitism in Europe “absolutely inflamed” her and changed her life. Brown was later investigated as a Communist. She spent a year at Dominican College, a Catholic women’s school in San Rafael, California, before transferring to the University of Arizona in 1948, where she joined Kappa Alpha Theta. Her father refused to support an acting career, so she chose education—on her mother’s advice and because teaching was considered acceptable for women of her generation—even though she had no interest in becoming a teacher. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in education in 1951.

After college, Cooney moved to Washington, D.C., and worked as a clerk and typist at the State Department. There, she was inspired by Father James Keller’s Christopher Movement, which argued that idealists should enter media rather than leave it to nonidealists. She returned to Phoenix and, despite no journalism experience, became a reporter for the *Arizona Republic*. Eighteen months later, in 1953, at age twenty-three, she moved to New York City. For the next ten years, she worked as a publicist—first for David Sarnoff at RCA, then at NBC writing press releases and soap opera synopses, and later for the *United States Steel Hour* at CBS. During this period, she became involved in liberal Democratic politics and joined a literary circle that gathered at the apartment of *Partisan Review* editor William Phillips, a group that included Jason Epstein and Norman Mailer. In 1956, after years of depression, her father died by suicide at his home in Phoenix.

While at the *U.S.