Parting Thoughts: Local publisher remembered for his humor and heart

In our Parting Thoughts series, we remember everyday Minnesotans.

During the lunch hour, the table at the private Minneapolis Club where Minnesota publisher Burton Cohen regularly held court is now open for the taking.

“I think he had lunch at the Minneapolis Club every day — every single day,” said longtime friend and former Pioneer Press theater critic Dominic Papatola.

Cohen was one of the many Minneapolis movers and shakers who visited the club. But what made him stand out was his humor, his kindness and how grounded he was, Papatola said.

“He treated everybody with sort of the equal amount of respectful disrespect,” Papatola said. “He talked to the servers exactly the same way that he talked to CEOs.”

At age 12, Cohen asked his parents for a mimeograph machine — a device that allows the user to create duplicate documents. He wanted to create a newspaper.

“Which I promptly did and for which I wrote a little column — which my parents to their dying days always regretted,” Cohen wrote in his final column for Mpls.St.Paul Magazine. “It was all downhill from there.”

He continued writing at Southwest High School for the newspaper. And continued when he went into the army and even after his graduation from the University of Minnesota’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication in 1955. His preference for the technology of that era never faded. He used a typewriter for his monthly column “The Cohen Report” in Mpls.St.Paul Magazine up until his death.

“Burt was like one of the the last of the old-school journalists who understood that it wasn’t a business. It was really a calling for him,” Papatola said.

According to his self-written obituary, he went into the family business, Modern Medicine medical publications, for several years before ownership changed. In 1978, he and his wife, Rusty, purchased Mpls. Magazine and transformed it into Mpls.St.Paul Magazine.

But his legacy as a publisher and columnist in the Twin Cities is dwarfed by the impact on his friends and local culture. Cohen served on several boards including the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minnesota Opera, the Children’s Theatre Company, Minnesota Zoo and a number of others.

“I apologize to a whole lot of people I’ve never met for stealing some of their allotment of good luck and joy and blessings,” he wrote. “For surely I’ve had much more than my fair share.” 

Burt Cohen died May 10, 2025, at the age of “94 1/2.”

To listen to the Parting Thoughts interview, click the player above.

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