R.I.P.: CBS Correspondent Jan Petersen Was 63

Jan Peterson

Jan Petersen, a former foreign correspondent for CBS television and radio and the wife of CBS News correspondent Barry Petersen, died Saturday at age 63 from early-onset Alzheimer's disease.

Jan had worked at CNN, ABC and CBS News, with postings in Tokyo and Moscow, in a journalism career that began as a part-time news writer at CBS affiliate KIRO in Seattle, before rising to producer, reporter, and anchor, under her maiden name, Jan Chorlton.

Eight years ago she was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's, a disease which affects approximately 250,000 Americans under the age of 65. The emotional story of how she and her family grappled with the effects of the disease were recounted in Barry Petersen's 2010 book, "Jan's Story," and in a "Sunday Morning" news story about how Alzheimer's changed the course of their nearly three-decade-long marriage.

"Jan was vivacious and lively, traits she kept even after her diagnosis in 2005, and took with her when I placed her into an assisted living facility in 2008," Barry Petersen wrote on Monday. "But it was a disease that had started taking her, in so many little ways, 10 to 15 years before all that. Such is the insidious, hideous way of Alzheimer's Disease."

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