My first job as a developer was writing COBOL (in 2007), and I only did it for a few months, so grain of salt here. I'm fairly certain PIC A(100) should be PIC X(100). A is "alphabetic." X is "alphanumeric" but supports ASCII characters that aren't a-z or 0-9.

That said, COBOL is weakly typed, so you can probably store non-alphabetic characters in a variable typed as alphabetic (at least without the compiler correcting you), but it might fail if you try to do certain operations on them.