My Father, J. W. Cooper By Francis Cooper Kroll Many years ago a workman was layinO’ with precision, a cement walk in the garden of a large house on the corner of Sola and Chapala Streets. A stately, Victorian house with many porches, high bay windows, and, proudly Widow’s Walk. As the man bent crowning its slanting roof there was to his task, a child ran from the shade of an old rubber tree across the wide green lawn, and quietly hut emphatically pressed her small foot in its but toned shoe into the still soft cement. The workman called out to her, angrily, just as a tall broad-shouldered man approached them. Gently, without raising his voice, the tail man said, “1 understand how you feel—but don’t scold the child. Footprints are like memories—to keep always.” It was my father, Joseph Wright Cooper speaking, and I was the little girl. A big man in every way—in stature, in character and in vision, he had made the long journey from the Eastern States to the West, three times by 1858—first in 1850—again from Missouri in 1851 with Colonel Newton Peters and Nelson McMahon, driving the first band of sheep (12,000) that ever crossed the plains from East to West. The time element obliged my father to leave these good friends at Devil’s Gate on the Sweetwater and to continue to California on horseback. In 1858 he returned once more to Missouri. Almost immediately, again with a large band of sheep, he started West as a partner of Hubbard Hollister. This trip and the years which followed brought about father’s associa tion and close friendship with Thomas and Albert Dibblee, the Hollister brothers and the buying of the great Spanish Grants in the vicinity of Lompoc by these five pioneers. He married my mother, Frances Mary, daughter of Albert G. Hollister, who had come to California later in 1871. Although I had my mother for so short a time in my life, years more could not have enriched the legacy she left me—the love of beauty and the appreciation of the written and spoken word. I must not dwell here on my affection, my gratitude and so much else—for this is not her story. Eventually there were six of us, and our parents indulged us, to be sure, but only because my father wantetl us to have everything he had been born to. and lost, so early in his life, owing to his father’s financial failure. Surely before him always was the memory of being left alone, after his father’s death, not only to support himself, but three sisters and a niece, as well. His brother, a medical student, could offer little or no assistance. But father had a vision, during those difficult years, of a kinder, far richer way of life, and it was that vision that brought him to California. His great strength of body and purpose made possible his success, his honesty. loyalty and modesty earned him his unbroken life-long friendships, and his kindness and gentleness deepened the happiness of his family. He left his ranch—the Santa Rosa—and retired from the life he loved, brought about bv the death of their first-born son, because he and my mother wanted a family, and the isolation of his property made prompt medical care im possible. It was then that they moved to Santa Barbara. However, Rancho Santa Rosa remained in his possession for the rest of his life. Some years after his death in 1905, the ranch was sold, with the exception of his favorite 14
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