George Milton Cohen

He was born on November 26, 1931, in Pittsburgh, PA, the son of Esther Lytton Cohen and Joseph Benjamin Cohen; and was predeceased by them and by his brothers Billy and Lawrence. He grew up in the Morningside neighborhood of Pittsburgh and graduated from Peabody High School and received his BS and MS from the University of Pittsburgh. As a teenager George and his friend Jack Stein travelled independently through Europe first on bikes, then on motorcycles, crossing the Atlantic on ships.

He interrupted his studies to join the Army; he spent a year and a half in Korea where he met Till Peters, who remained his best friend. He moved to New Jersey to take a job at the New Jersey Neuro Psychiatric Institute near Princeton. There he met Sara Wilber; they fell in love and were married in 1964. He was offered a job at Columbia Presbyterian Psychiatric Hospital in Manhattan and worked with Robert Spitzer to develop an early edition of the DSM manual, used to define mental illnesses. George and family spent a sabbatical year at the School for the Deaf and Blind in St Augustine FL, and he continued to consult to schools for the deaf for quite a time. Sara taught for 20 years at Friends School of Baltimore.

He was the author with three others of Child Care with Emotionally Disturbed Children. After three years in New York City he was offered a faculty position at the University of Maryland Medical School in Baltimore where he and Sara then moved and bought a house in Bolton Hill where they lived for 37 years until he retired after thirty years. They later moved to Hampden and finally to Cross Keys. They celebrated their fiftieth anniversary with a trip to Bermuda. Their daughters Alexandra and Eliza were born in Baltimore. "Alix" and husband Paul Szostak have a son Max and a daughter Stella and "Liza" and her husband Randy Greer have two sons, Marshall and Isadore; they all survive him. Before and after retirement George and Sara were lucky enough to travel to about thirty-three states and all five major continents, highlighted by trips to the Amazon, the fjords of Norway, the sights of Egypt and multiple trips to Ireland. George was an avid reader of historical and fictional history, a lover of classical music especially opera, and an award-winning amateur photographer. In earlier years he played the stock market and in his leisure time did recreational gambling at casinos here, abroad and on cruise ships! His greatest pleasure was entertaining his daughters and grandchildren with family stories. His family friends and Sara wife of sixty-one years will miss and treasure him.

Donations in his memory are suggested to his favorite charities: WWF, ASPCA and NPR.