Tarrytown's Mary Lane Cobb Honored as Woman of Distinction

Talk to Dr. Mary Lane Cobb for a minute and you immediately get the sense that she is well-spoken, well-storied, and highly accomplished.

State Senator Andrea Stewart-Cousins (D/I/WF – 35th District) seems to agree. The Senator just presented a Woman of Distinction award to Cobb, a former family doctor who lives in Tarrytown. Cobb, who said “it came as a great surprise,” was among about 68 women awarded with the honor recently in Albany.

The award is bestowed upon, according to a press release from the Senator's Office, “women whose lives, work, or special accomplishments have contributed to making our communities better, our families stronger and serve as extraordinary examples to others.”

“It is truly an honor to celebrate the life and achievements of Dr. Mary Lane Cobb,” said Stewart-Cousins.  “She is a remarkable woman who has broken through barriers that are all too common for women and especially women of color.”

Forget the idea of slowing down in retirement. Cobb is B-U-S-Y and it seems she always has been. “I don't seem to be relaxing much,” she said. “Volunteer work has the tendency to become all-consuming.”

“Although retired, Dr. Cobb remains active in the community and still serves as an inspiration to all of us,” said Stewart-Cousins.  

For many years, Cobb has been active with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and, for 15 years, with its ACT-SO program. (She was chair of its regional division for 15 years; now her husband James Cobb is the chair.) The organization aims to show young people of African heritage that they are “as good and as competent as anyone.” ACT-SO holds regional competitions in arts and letters, science and business, which feeds into a gold medal national contest. They just awarded 11 Westchester students (from Yonkers, Ossining, among others), to go to the Nationals in August.

Cobb is the Chair of the Board of Youth Theater Interactions, a Yonkers after-school program for performing arts for kids aged 6 to 19. “It's served hundreds of children” in its nearly 40 years, she said. The kids are taught by professional instructors in dance, acting, steel band, chorus. “It's really wonderful,” she said. (The annual recital themed “Celebrating our Children” is coming up on June 10 in Hawthorne).

Then there's her sorority, Delta Sigma Theta, “a group that's very community-minded in Westchester.” She was a founding member of the . She is co-chair of the Westchester Women's Health Partnership. To name a few.

How far she's come. From the segregated south in West Virginia and Louisville, Kentucky – Cobb grew up in a family of teachers, yet all her schools were segregated up through high school – on to medical training at Indiana University and in Philadelphia, and then landing here.

From 1955 to about 1968, Cobb practiced family medicine out of a little white stucco house in her South Broadway back yard (her son Keith, an actor, one of three children, stays there intermittently now). “I enjoyed that relationship with my patients, and they with me. We had a partnership,” Cobb said. “It's not so much like that now [in medicine]. I don't think I'd like it now.”

Though she got married in the near her house in Tarrytown, she's been an active member of the Community Unitarian Church in White Plains since 1965.

After practicing in Tarrytown, she become the director of research projects for Planned Parenthood in the city. Both the civil rights and the women's movements were at their peaks. The state had liberalized abortion; her center helped get women contraception. “It was a very exciting time for me,” Cobb said.

From the mid-1970s to the early 1990s, she spent the rest of her professional life in the Westchester Department of Health, as Director of Women and Youth Services. She was the first African-American woman to be named to a directorship within Westchester County government.

“Since then, it's been all volunteering, and trying to sing once in a while,” she said.

Cobb was just part of a Sunday recital in Harlem for the Thomas Music Study Club, of the National Association of Negro Musicians, a 100-year-old organization whose aim is to nurture and support any music performed and/or composed by African-Americans. She sang “How Sweet the Rose in Spring,” by Dr. Aaron Bell, a jazz bassist/composer/teacher who coached Cobb before he passed away about 10 years ago.

Cobb happened to receive a rose at the ceremony in Albany. “A lovely red rose, in a vial so it is still lovely and fresh,” she said.

“It is very important to show our appreciation for women like Dr. Cobb, who through tireless activism and care for those around her, are worthy of this important recognition,” said Stewart-Cousins.

The rewards are immeasurable when it comes to volunteering. “It's demanding, but when you see some things come to fruition, it makes it all worthwhile,” Cobb said.

And of course, there's always more work to do. How far we've come, yes, she agrees, but how much further there is to go.

“It breaks my heart to see the clock turning back socially and politically,” Cobb said. “We have to keep at it.”

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