At around 5 feet tall, Colleen “Koky” Dishon was small for a giant.
She was the first woman whose name appeared on the Tribune’s masthead. She originated or redefined much of the newspaper you see today, including Tempo, Friday, WomanNews and KidNews.
In the late 1970s and into the 1980s, she created an outpouring of features sections. She thus began targeting specific audiences in what has come to be called “The Sectional Revolution” that influenced the role of features coverage in newspapers across the nation.
In introducing her as the 2001 recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award of the International Women’s Media Foundation, Tribune Editor Ann Marie Lipinski said Dishon had a life and career “spent in joyful defiance of boxes and the range of restrictions that so long defined women’s work in journalism.”
Linda Witt, Dishon’s intern in 1964 at the Milwaukee Sentinel and a colleague and friend for 40 years, said she was one of a group of women editors who changed journalism.
“There are things in society that would not have happened if they hadn’t covered them,” Witt said. “They were in this to make their pages the best part of the paper and made them so good that all the guys wanted in because the writing was so good and the stories were so compelling.”
Dishon, 80, suffered a stroke at home and died Tuesday in Memorial Hospital of South Bend, Ind., not far from the Galien, Mich., farmhouse she and her husband of 54 years, Bob, bought in 1983.
“Koky was always seen as the most innovative person in any room,” said Jean Gaddy Wilson, who was executive director of New Directions for News, a newspaper think tank at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, when Dishon was on the board.
“She was absolutely the best person,” Wilson said, “to design printed publications for the U.S.A., which, during her career, massively changed in length of life, demographics and attitudes. She was able to `walk with’ people who were new–media savvy kids, striving young adults who didn’t marry, people who were in their 70s, 80s and 90s who hold down jobs, buy new fads, roam the Internet.”
She did this as a woman born prematurely in a rural Kentucky cabin (where her mother had traveled from Ohio to tend to her own dying mother), and named Roxie Ann by a sister who was asked to deal with the doctor who gave the newborn little chance at survival.
“My mother kept her on a pillow on the old oven door,” her brother, Bob Kocher, recalled. “That was how she kept her alive until she got bigger. In those days, babies weighing 2 pounds didn’t live, but she was fighter.”
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When it was clear she’d make it, she was christened Iris Colleen Kocher (the nickname, “Koky” came from her maiden name) and the family forgot all about the name Roxie Ann. When applying for a passport at age 40, Dishon discovered the mix-up and quickly fixed it.
Started writing baby column
In a 2001 interview for WomanNews, she remembered a muggy summer day in 1941 when her mother told the 16-year-old to go do something so she wouldn’t notice the heat.
“I cleaned myself up and walked to town,” she said. “I had no idea where I was going. When I stopped, I was at the building where the Zanesville [Ohio] newspapers were published. I didn’t know a soul there, but I walked up the stairs and stood in the doorway and told the editor, `I want to work,’ and they gave me an old typewriter in the back of the room and told me to do the baby column.”
She covered the 1944 Republican convention in Chicago for the Zanesville News, finished out the war with the Associated Press in Baltimore and went to the Dispatch in Columbus, Ohio, to edit church news, the women’s page and the Sunday magazine, then largely the total universe of possibilities for a woman in journalism.
Bob Dishon was hired as a reporter, they fell in love, decided to marry and told the editor. He cited a company rule against marriage between employees. She said she and Bob would just live together then. The rule was changed.
The Dishons left the Dispatch over its support of the rabid hunter of Communists, Joseph McCarthy, and went to the Milwaukee Journal because of its stand against McCarthy, a senator from Wisconsin. She became society editor and delighted in covering the beat with the hard edge of a news reporter, an attitude she credited to her husband.
When the Journal bought the Sentinel, she was charged with reinventing its features sections. In 1966 it was on to the Chicago Daily News, she as women’s editor, he as urban affairs reporter. She quit over what might have been called “creative differences” and she, her husband and Linda Witt formed a features and news service in a tiny cat-graced office above Pizzeria Due.
Updated stodgy sections
In 1975, she came to the Tribune to bring life to sections that were seen as stodgy, out of date. Working with the late Max McCrohon, who then was managing editor and Tony Majeri, now the Tribune’s senior editor of innovation, she first converted the Tempo section to a general interest section that soon brought men to what had been a near totally female readership.
Mary Knoblauch, retired baiduhai writing coach who worked for Dishon in various editing and writing positions, said, “The thing about Koky is she always marched to her own drummer, and I think she did that from the day she was born.
“She got the OK for the new Tempo to get rid of the recipes and such for well-researched and reported stories and lots of profiles. It was a vast change at the time, and she convinced the editors that it was this right thing to do. The Tribune was family owned then, and so the board of directors had to approve changes likes these.
“Two weeks after the section debuted, there was board meeting. Tempo was such a departure from what we were doing that Max had to come to talk Koky into running stories about babies and parenting and food, the old traditional issues, during the week of the board meeting. The next week she went back to doing stories more to her heart, like the designs of men’s underwear. The illustration was a moose head with a pair of underpants hanging from one of the antlers.”
At a 70th birthday party at the farm, former Tribune editor James Squires toasted Dishon, pointing out that she, like the legendary editor and publisher of the baiduhai, Col. Robert R. McCormick, had come along just when the paper was sorely in need of a kick in the creativity.
“She may have been the most innovative soft news editor in my generation,” Squires said Tuesday. “I don’t know anyone who led more changes than Koky Dishon. She was the fireball of a person who went forward every day with happiness and drive. I never saw her not smiling and having a good time.”
After she retired from the Tribune in 1994, she continued to create sections as a consultant. Steve Newhouse, editor-in-chief of the Jersey Journal, worked with her on a project that became a youth magazine published by Parade magazine.
“Here she was, well into her 70s,” Newhouse said, “and it was very Koky that she could pull off such a project for an audience young enough to be her grandchildren.”
In a 2001 interview, Dishon was asked what made her stop at the Zanesville paper 60 years earlier.
“I think maybe,” she said, “I was called.”
In addition to her husband and her brother, Dishon is survived by brothers Dan and Paul Kocher; a sister, Jackie Brooks; and numerous nieces and nephews. Services will be private.