(5 of 8)
Then, as the stove got red, the heat pushed them back in a big circle that filled up the whole room"—until they pressed against John's desk. "When the circle closed up tight again, I'd know it was time to get up and put in more coal." Often, especially on Saturdays, when the countryfolk came to town, Cooper wrote little notes for them to carry to local restaurants. Each was a chit for a cheap meal, and Cooper, on —a $2,500 salary, picked them up later. People began to call on him at all hours of the day or night. Each morning a crowd gathered in front of his house to greet and accompany him to work. When he set out down Main Street on his way to lunch, he looked like an Old Testament prophet with his flock, and it sometimes took an hour to walk two blocks. Nowadays, when Senator Cooper is at home, a long line of cars stretches out in front of his house, and the parlor and kitchen are usually jammed with constituents.
Very few of Cooper's Republican senatorial colleagues have had a comparably thorough experience in grass-roots politics.
The Army Life. In 1942, after an unsuccessful try for the governorship. Cooper enlisted in the Army as a private.
Army life was rough for a man of his years (41 when he enlisted), but Cooper soon exercised his family capacity for leadership. On his first furlough back to Somerset, Private Cooper was followed off the train by a fierce-looking master sergeant, who deposited Cooper's barracks bag on the platform, bade him goodbye, and climbed back aboard. "John always gets everybody to work for him," says his sister Faustine Hardine. "It takes 15 people to run him." In the Army Cooper won a commission in OCS, became a specialist in military government and rode across Europe with General George Patton's Third Army (he still keeps Patton's photograph on the wall of his Senate office). He also met and married Evelyn Pfaff, a nurse. Evelyn came back to Somerset to live, but the marriage did not work out, and in 1949, Cooper divorced her, charging abandonment.
Nowadays he is one of the Senate's few single men,* and a reluctant target for Washington's eager hostesses.
In Europe Cooper won a Bronze Star for meritorious service, but his most distinguished work was after V-E day, when, as a military government officer, he reestablished Bavaria's court system. While he was still in Munich, some of Captain Cooper's friends back in Kentucky got him the nomination for circuit judge for Pulaski and the adjoining counties. He was unopposed. Arriving in Somerset in the midst of the postwar shortage of white shirts, he made his debut on the bench wearing a G.I. shirt.