Friend Remembers 'Whip-Smart' Journalist Lost to Lung Cancer

Nov. 9, 2005 — -- Two weeks ago, my friend Cheryl McCall died of lung cancer. She was too young -- just 55 -- but she had done a century worth of living at a breakneck pace that was dizzying and dazzling to behold.

She was a rabble-rouser blacklisted by the FBI, a crusading reporter for two decades and an Oscar-nominated producer. And Cheryl was just getting warmed up for the last, best act of her life.

She got noticed from the moment she left McKeesport, Pa., in the late 1960s (one of eight children; her father was a steelworker; her mother, a waitress). Cheryl was whip-smart, charismatic, steel-willed -- and determined, as she put it, to "agitate and inform."

"You faced a choice," recalls Tom Taylor, a fellow activist, about meeting Cheryl for the first time. "Either follow -- or get out of the way."

Her editorials against the Vietnam War in Detroit's Wayne State College paper led then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to brand her a security threat (she kept the note as a badge of honor).

I was a cub reporter at LIFE magazine, when, in the early '80s, Cheryl swooped in like a tiny force of nature: energetic, restless, full of confidence and swagger (if anyone can swagger at 5 feet tall).

"We all trailed behind that little woman," recalls writer Anne Fadiman. "She was always full throttle, no brakes."

Cheryl wrote about celebrities, but also famine in Ethiopia and poverty in Haiti. And like too many of us in those days, she thought she was bulletproof; she chain-smoked three packs of Benson & Hedges Slim Light 100s a day.

We envied her knack for becoming close friends with the stars she met: Willie Nelson, Maya Angelou, Billie Jean King. But it was the powerless -- the vulnerable -- that Cheryl really cared about. In African deserts and urban ghettos, she sought out the children. In 1985, she raised $150,000 and turned her LIFE story about Seattle street kids into the film "Streetwise." A few months later, wearing a glittering blue dress (none of us had ever seen her wear one), she was strutting down the red carpet, nominated for an Academy Award.