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As a high-school senior, John Sherman was captain of the military training unit, president of his class, commencement orator (his subject: "The German Spy System") and class poet. In 1918 he went off to Kentucky's football-famed Centre College, and a year later he entered Yale. At New Haven (class of '23) he was captain of the basketball team, and was tapped for the elite society, Skull and Bones.
After Yale, Cooper went on to Harvard Law School. In the summer of his first year his dying father called the family around his bedside and told them that John would be the head of the family.
Judge Cooper, his son found, had been caught in the economic recession of 1920.
Once worth at least $250,000, the old man was in serious debt at his death. John Sherman decided to assume all his father's obligations. After another year at Harvard, Cooper realized that he could not manage his family's affairs and pursue his law degree at the same time, and regretfully came home (he was admitted to the Kentucky bar, after an examination, in 1928).
Cooper liquidated his father's sawmills and timberland, sold the family mansion and moved into a modest frame house where his mother, a spry 76, still lives.
Mrs. Cooper got a job in the local public school. John Sherman paid off the debts, managed to send the other six children to college. His task took 25 years ("It didn't look like there was any end to it"), and he did not manage to get into the black until 1950.
Cheers for Father. Cooper had not been back in Pulaski County long before he began to drift into local politics. Following Kentucky custom, candidates for office announce themselves on "court day," when, after the grand jury is impaneled, the judge recesses the court for the day and turns the courtroom over to the candidates. When John Sherman Cooper announced that he was running on the Republican ticket for the state House of Representatives in 1927, the crowd cheered. "They weren't cheering for me," says Cooper. "They were cheering for my father." He won without opposition.
After two years in Frankfort, he went back to Pulaski County and tried for the local political plum: county judge. In the election of 1929 he won handily, and moved into the office his father and grandfather had occupied before him.
A county judge, in the Kentucky sense, is the local law enforcer, political leader, friend in need of the political faithful, comptroller of patronage and state-relief funds, and father confessor to anyone with a problem. Cooper found that as many as 30 people crowded into his office every morning. His desk was in the corner of the room and the potbellied stove was in an adjacent corner. Cooper recalls what it was like on a cold day: "Early in the morning everybody would cluster close up around the stove until it got hot.