ROBERTSON, JOSEPHINE (JO) WUEBBEN (1900-19 Oct. 1990) pioneered first as a woman reporter in daily journalism and later as a reporter in the field of medical journalism. The daughter of a Lutheran minister, she was born in Napoleon, O., raised in Logan, and received degrees from Ohio Univ. and Ohio State Univ.
After a year as an assistant principal in an Indiana high school, she visited Cleveland in 1923 and on an impulse secured a job as the only woman reporter on the staff of the PLAIN DEALER. She retired 2 years later to marry the Plain Dealer's associate editor, CARL TROWBRIDGE ROBERTSON, but returned following Robertson's death in 1935. Mrs. Robertson continued her husband's editorial-page column, "Outdoors Diary," for 20 years but also began filing stories in the field of medical reporting. As Cleveland's first full-time medical reporter, she was given membership in the National Science Writers Assoc. A series she wrote in 1963 on the shortage of general practitioners in Ohio's small towns received a citation from the Ohio Academy of General Practice, while a 1965 series on cancer won a National Headliner award from the national women's journalism sorority, Theta Sigma Psi.
Robertson's hobbies included bridge, gardening, and the piano, on which she received instruction from ARTHUR LOESSER. Having retired from the Plain Dealer in 1967, she published the history SAINT LUKE'S HOSPITAL, 1894-1980, in 1981. She died in a nursing home near Chardon after several years' affliction with Alzheimer's disease, survived by her son, the novelist DON ROBERTSON.