IN MEMORIAM: BROMLEY F. COOPER

Anne Cooper

December 1994 was the 10th anniversary of Brom Cooper's death. In his honor, my mother, his widow Martha Cooper, is endowing a fellowship in his name at The University of Texas at Austin for graduate student studies in South Texas Archaeology. Along with the endowment his entire artifact collection will be donated to the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory at The University of Texas at Austin. Donations can be made to the Bromley F. Cooper Endowed Fellowship through the Development Office (attn. Janis Richards), The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712.

My father was born in 1916 in Duluth Minnesota. He grew up in the North, and became a Texan by choice in the 1940s. He met my mother, Martha Buhler, a dark-eyed beauty from Victoria, while serving as a pilot trainer at Foster Field during World War II. After serving in the Army Air Corps, he took a job with Humble Oil and Refining Company (later to become Exxon) and settled with his family in Houston.

I remember my father as intelligent, passionate, eccentric, obsessed, shy and opinionated, with a wonderful sense of humor. He was a loving father, and a devoted husband. With a keen passion for knowledge, he was an insatiable reader. His taste in literature was eclectic, ranging from pulp fiction by Dick Francis or Stephen King to The Egyptian Book of the Dead and the Dancing Wu Li Masters with much in between. He subscribed to Scientific American and Archaeology Today, along with National Review and other conservative periodicals. Although I did not always agree with my father I respected his mind and learned much from him. I enjoy classical music and am passionate about gardening, experiences that I learned to love from him. His list of hobbies indicated his curiosity and interest in life. Besides gardening, reading, and music he enjoyed bike riding, he raised tropical fish and he loved fishing and baking bread. But the hobby that would be all consuming for him did not come along until his fateful transfer by Exxon to Kingsville in the mid-1960s.

Although not happy about the move initially, he soon learned to love South Texas. Daddy was not a city man, he had no interest in those cultural events that make a city a worthwhile place to live. My father was basically a loner. He preferred working quietly in his garden, riding his bike, reading or fishing in the peaceful dawn twilight at Port O'Connor. Although he had friends and acquaintances, the silence of solitude seemed a powerful draw to him. The move to Kingsville turned out to be a blessing. It offered the serenity he loved, the warm climate he enjoyed and access to millions of acres of rangeland for his new-found passion, "arrowhead hunting," as he called it. He used to say that if he died out in the "boondocks" looking for Indian artifacts, he would die a happy man.

South Texas' flat cactus-strewn wastelands were heaven on earth to my father. The huge expanse of sky, the hawks circling overhead, even the rattlesnakes at his feet were an elixir for his soul. Finding points was a bonus. He rode his bicycle 20 miles a day to keep in shape, and spent weekends out in the countryside. He anthropomorphised the points, he jokingly talked of hearing their mating calls, and of course, the tiny, delicate "birdpoints" were the offspring.

Interest in science was another of his passions. In the 1930s he graduated from Michigan State University with a degree in entomology. Although not pursuing this as a career he never lost his love of the scientific method. As his Indian artifact collection grew so did his research in archaeology, he started studying the history of the area, and what was known about stone artifacts. He became an expert at point identification, and early on kept accurate records on the locations of his discoveries. (Daddy was a prodigious record keeper, when told by his GP that he had high blood pressure, he bought his own blood pressure kit, and took a measurement at a certain hour each day and graphed the readings out over years!) He worked with The University of Texas at San Antonio, loaning them portions of his collection for documentation. He found ancient Paleo-Indian points in the area. His work led to one of the most outstanding collections of Paleo-Indian points found in South Texas, and its contribution to the archaeological knowledge of the area has been invaluable.

Although a fierce individualist and a loner, he had enormous respect for science and those who pursued the truth through scientific investigation. He loved South Texas, and he loved the unique and interesting life he created there for himself. We miss him.