way, raised to be a housewife and a mother, to work an interesting job when I got out of college, and to marry at the appropriate age, which would have been twenty-five". She attended North High School in Phoenix, where she was active in school plays. She stated that her biggest influence as a teenager was her teacher Bud Brown, whose lectures about the civil rights movement, poverty, the free press, and antisemitism in Europe "absolutely inflamed" her and changed her life. Brown was later investigated as a Communist. She went to Dominican College, an all-girls Catholic institution in San Rafael, California, for a year before transferring to the University of Arizona in 1948, where she was a member of Kappa Alpha Theta. She stopped acting in college because her father refused to support her in that career. She chose education, even though she was not interested in becoming a teacher, on the recommendation of her mother and because as she later stated, "It was something that girls of my generation did because teaching was acceptable". Early career After graduating in 1951, Ganz moved to Washington, D.C., where she worked as a clerk and typist at the State Department. She was exposed to Father James Keller's Christopher Movement, which inspired her to become involved with television and the media. Cooney later said, "Father Keller said that if idealists didn't go into the media, nonidealists would". She returned to Phoenix and despite no experience in journalism, took a job as a reporter at the Arizona Republic. Eighteen months later, in 1953 and at the age of 23, she moved to New York City and was a publicist for the next ten years, initially for David Sarnoff at RCA, then at NBC writing press releases and soap opera synopses, and then for the United States Steel Hour at CBS. During this time, she became involved with liberal Democratic politics and "fell in with a literary set of young writers and editors who gathered at the West Side apartment of Partisan Review editor William Phillips". Some of this "notable group" included Jason Epstein and Norman Mailer. In 1956, after many years of depression, Cooney's father committed suicide at his home in Phoenix. While Cooney was working for the U.S. Steel Hour, a colleague left to work for the educational television station WGBH-TV in Boston; her reaction was life-changing: "What?! There is educational television?!"