Dawn Cookler, para athlete and disability advocate from Coram, dies at 61

For Coram para athlete and disability advocate Dawn Cookler, it was all in the words of the band Chumbawamba: "I get knocked down, but I get up again / You’re never gonna keep me down."

"Both of us, that was our theme song," enthused her sister and best friend, Dana Cookler Detelich, a retired special education teacher in Raleigh, North Carolina. Dawn, who with lifelong cerebral palsy relied on crutches and wheelchairs for mobility, "never took no for an answer." Years before the Americans with Disabilities Act became law in 1990, "She wanted to be treated equally and she was adamant that she was going to be, so she fought for it."

Cookler died Sept. 24 at the Medford Multicare Center, age 61, of liver cancer.

Among her victories as a member the Disability Task Force for the Town of Brookhaven and a board member of the Medford-based Self-Initiated Living Options (SILO), she helped get extended hours for Suffolk County Accessible Transportation (SCAT), a shared-ride, curb-to-curb service for those with disabilities.

"The [SCAT] buses only run till 8:30, so I can't take" them to 8 p.m. meetings of the Coram Civic Association, she told the Public Works & Transportation Committee of the Suffolk County Legislature in 2016. "I could wheel down the street to the meeting on the sidewalk, but that's hard to do in the winter when it's cold and it's snowing and all the sidewalks are covered in snow. And a lot of things start at 8 o'clock so if the buses ran till 10 o'clock that would be very helpful." SCAT transportation now does so, Mondays through Saturdays.

Sang in the choir

"The one word I would use for her is indomitable," said her friend Rabbi Lisa Ann Wharton, of Huntington, the cantor at Temple Beth Emeth of Mount Sinai, where Cookler was a trustee and sang in the choir. "There was nothing that could stop her from doing something she believed in. I admired her tenacity and her optimism."

As an 18-year-old, Cookler competed in the second annual Plainview / Austin Drugs Five Mile Run, going the distance on crutches for 3 hours and 13 minutes. At Harborfields High School, in Greenlawn, where she grew up, she competed in winter track events including shot put, discus and javelin. And she organized disco-dance benefits for the local affiliate of United Cerebral Palsy, where she would later work as a public relations staffer and spokesperson.

With the former para athlete group the Suffolk Seagulls, she competed in the national Cerebral Palsy Games, now the World Abilitysport Games, in shot put, wheelchair soccer and powerlifting. At the now-defunct Can-Am Pacific Games in 1987, she participated in club throw and 200-meter wheelchair race, and set a national record in her category for free-weight lifting, hoisting 132.5 pounds to break the previous record of 130.

At age 60, she competed in shot put last year at the USA Track & Field Long Island Open Masters Championships.

Hofstra University graduate

Born in Manhattan on Jan. 17, 1965, and raised in Flushing, Queens, until her family moved to Greenlawn when she was about 2, Dawn Michele Cookler was the elder of two daughters of accountant Alan Bruce Cookler and medical secretary Arlene Ferne Holzman Cookler.

After graduating from Harborfields, she earned a bachelor’s degree from Hofstra University in Hempstead in 1987, majoring in drama with an emphasis on technical theater. Her work doing theatrical lighting for bands performing at Hofstra led to her convincing Men Without Hats ("Safety Dance") to sing "Happy Birthday" to her sister from the stage during their November 1983 show, Dana Cookler said.

Dawn went on to a master’s degree in health administration, according to family. In addition to working for United Cerebral Palsy — including as business manager of the Suffolk affiliate’s Tele-Touch telephone reminder service in the late 1990s — she worked at the Jones Beach Information Center while a graduate student.

From 2019-2021, she was among the "leather contingent" marchers in Fire Island’s annual Cherry Grove Pride Parade.

In addition to her sister, she is survived by her father, of Palm Coast, Florida, and two nieces.

A service was held on Sept. 28 at the Star of David Memorial Chapels, in West Babylon. She was buried the same day in that hamlet’s New Montefiore Cemetery.