Sharon E. Cannon

CEDAR FALLS – Sharon E. Cannon died Friday, March 4, 2016, at Covenant Medical Center, Waterloo, from complications of emphysema. She was born Nov. 18, 1931, in a small house on Rainbow Drive in Cedar Falls, and she received her early education in rural Iowa school houses. During World War II, she moved with her brother and mother, an elementary school teacher, to San Diego. (Her mother, Florence Bond, later returned to Cedar Falls to spend a generation teaching 5th grade at Lincoln Elementary.) After graduating from San Diego High School in the late 1940s, she moved to Chicago and met and married the jazz musician Bill Cannon there in the early ‘50s. They relocated to Southern California, where she worked for the County of Los Angeles while he toured the world and played tenor saxophone with some of the leading R&B acts of the day: Little Richard, Ike and Tina Turner, Sly and the Family Stone among them. He was a member of the Charles Wright and the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band, and a highlight of her life with a musician was the night in 1971 when she accompanied him to the Grammy Awards. (The band’s hit single “Love Land" was nominated for Best R&B Performance by a Duo or Group; it was one of nine singles to reach Billboard’s pop and/or R&B chart during the band’s heyday, and their music continues to be covered and sampled by scores of rap and hip-hop artists and featured in movie soundtracks.) In the early 1970s, they moved with their five children to Cedar Falls and later divorced. She never remarried and embarked on a 23-year career as manager at what is now the Chicago Central and Commerce Credit Union in Waterloo. She was active in the Council of World Credit Unions’ efforts to bring credit unions to developing countries and volunteered as an ambassador for the group in Africa, spending several weeks in Niger and touring neighboring countries. She was a lifelong reader and passed her passion for books on to her children, loved watching old Hollywood movies and could test any golf expert’s knowledge of what was happening on the PGA tour, concurring that Rickie Fowler bears a striking resemblance to a younger Leonardo DiCaprio. She had a distinctive and voluminous laugh that could fill a room, even after she started suffering the cruel, wind-robbing effects of COPD. She is survived by two daughters, Patricia Cannon-Olszewski of Stanwood, Wash., and Kathleen Cannon of Cedar Falls; and two sons, William Cannon of Chapel Hill, N.C., Charles Cannon of Cedar Falls; and three grandchildren. Another son, Joseph Cannon, died in 1988. No services are being planned at this time. Instead of sending flowers, please consider a small donation to the Cedar Falls Public Library in Sharon Cannon’s name to purchase large-print books for others who, like her in her final decade, would otherwise be cut off from the universe of reading.

Sharon E. Cannon

November 18, 1931 - March 4, 2016