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Growing Up Plain
Wilmer Cooper
Excerpt from Chapter 3: "Growing Up Plain" in Growing Up Plain: The Journey of a Public Friend
by Wilmer Cooper, Friends United Press, 1999.
As a young boy growing up in a Conservative Friends home and community, I had a clear feeling of the greatness and goodness of God. As I look back on this, it is something of a surprise to me-especially since I chose to break away from that community and its expectations at a fairly young age. Nevertheless, this was the view of the created universe that I experienced.
We did go through some very hard times, especially during the Great Depression-1929 and most of the 1930s. But even though I knew of bad things that happened in the larger world, and sometimes in our community, it never occurred to me to ask, "Why do bad things happen to good people?"-the theme of Harold S. Kushner's small book (1981) on the problem of good and evil and how to reconcile that with a good and loving God.
As a boy, it just seemed to me that the world as looked at from the earth with the blue sky and the sun and moon and stars above constituted a friendly and supportive life here in this vast universe. For this I was, and continue to be, thankful, even though I have learned since that the natural world, as well as the world of people, can be much more unfriendly, violent and destructive than I was able to comprehend then.
My extended family's entrance into the Ohio Conservative Friends community began at the turn of the twentieth century, when my Cooper family forebears moved from Chester County, Pennsylvania (southwest of Philadelphia) to Columbiana County, in east-central Ohio. My father, Walter M. Cooper (1870-1950), was the youngest of ten children. He and two older brothers and four sisters made this trek from the Orthodox Philadelphia Yearly Meeting (Arch Street) to Ohio Yearly Meeting (Conservative).
My father's eldest brother, Cyrus Cooper, who for all practical purposes was the patriarch of the family, made the first foray to Ohio Yearly Meeting at Barnesville, Ohio, in 1897. Because the family was increasingly uneasy about some of the progressivism of Philadelphia Orthodox Friends, they were in search of a place among Friends where they could feel that the "ancient testimonies" of Friends were honored and practiced. In Ohio Yearly Meeting (Conservative ) they believed they had found such a place.
When they arrived in Ohio, these members of our extended family first settled in the neighborhood of Salem, Ohio, which was central to the northern quarterly meeting of Ohio Yearly Meeting (Conservative). Salem is approximately ninety miles upstate from Barnesville, the yearly meeting's unofficial headquarters. Barnesville is also the location of Olney Friends School (formerly known as Friends Boarding School), which has been until recently under the care of Ohio Conservative Friends. Some of the Cooper brothers and sisters brought their spouses with them from Pennsylvania, while others, including my father, found their "life mates" among Conservative Friends in Ohio.
My father met my mother, Anna P. Blackburn, when he came from Pennsylvania for the wedding of my Uncle Harry Cooper and Ruth Satterthwaite from Winona, Ohio. My mother was then a teacher at the Conservative Friends Primary School at Salem, Ohio. She had been raised on a farm fourteen miles southeast, near the unincorporated village of Middleton, Ohio, which formerly was known by the post office name of Mosk, Ohio.
Mother came from a family of six children, four girls and two boys. After attending Friends schools in Ohio she went to Westtown Boarding School near Philadelphia for additional training. This helped to prepare her for teaching at Friends Primary School at Salem.
Following my parents' marriage, Third Month 23, 1905, they served on the staff of the Tunesasseh Indian School in western New York state, which was founded and supported by Friends from Philadelphia. Father worked in the dairy while mother taught the Indian children.
After a brief stay at the school my parents moved back to Middleton, where they were joined by Uncle Cyrus and Aunt Bertha and their son Samuel, who moved from Salem to Middleton to take up residence and work. This move apparently took place in 1907. There was a well-established Conservative Friends meeting at Middleton to which they felt drawn.
Uncle Cyrus started a general store in his home, which he operated for nearly ten years. At that point, in 1917, Uncle Cyrus returned to the carpentry trade, which he had practiced back east. After a half dozen years he again entered the store business forming a partnership with another Conservative Friend, David Morlan. They opened what became the Rural Supply Store at Middleton to serve rural families for several miles round. They sold everything from hardware to feed, to groceries, to drygoods and much more. After it had become a thriving business, the groceries and drygoods were separated into another store across the street, run initially by Kenneth Morse, a plain Conservative Friend who had moved from Cleveland, Ohio to join Middleton Friends. The grocery and drygoods store, however, was later taken back by Cyrus Cooper. At this point the Rural Supply partnership was sold to Cyrus' son, Samuel Cooper, in partnership with my older brother, James R. Cooper.
Middleton was a sparsely settled rural village of perhaps a hundred people. It was located on State Route 7, halfway between the industrial steel city of Youngstown to the north and East Liverpool located on the Ohio River to the south. We were about eight miles west of the Ohio-Pennsylvania line. Our mail came by rural delivery from Columbiana, Ohio, four miles northwest. The only other business in the village, besides the Cooper general store, our greenhouse and roadside market, and a blacksmith shop, was a gasoline station and auto repair garage run by Howard Cope, a member of our meeting who never attended.
One way to understand the Quaker nature of this community is to compare it with an Old Mennonite or Amish community. Indeed, we were located only a few miles from a Mennonite settlement where "plain people" lived and horse-drawn buggies were to be seen on the roadways. Middleton was somewhat in transition when I was growing up, because buggies were being replaced by Model T Fords, or other makes of cars. Mud roads were beginning to be graveled and a few were paved. I can remember when State Road 7 was built through Middleton. It became a busy two-lane, concrete highway between Lake Erie to the north and the Ohio River. Trucks hauling coal went north to the steel mills while steel was hauled south to the Ohio River for shipment.
Our Friends community was basically a separate culture unto itself. About the only place it connected with the world around was through our business contacts, which were essential for the survival of both. Just as the quietistic Friends of the eighteenth century tried to separate themselves from "the world" like the Mennonites and Amish did, so most Conservative Friends settlements in eastern Ohio "hedged" themselves in from the people around them. I sensed that "the world out there" could easily encroach on the purity of our religious faith and practice if we mingled too much with these folk.
The life that my parents and the Conservative Friends community believed in living was pretty hum-drum. The message I got was: life's a serious business and you'd better be living every moment for the Lord. My mother really depended on her leading of the Spirit, even moment by moment. You were a little suspect if you laughed too much; life was a very sober kind of business.
Our meeting, like most Conservative Friends meetings in those days, did not believe in First Day Schools for the purpose of teaching the Bible and giving moral and religious instruction. Rather, we had daily Bible reading in our home, everyday after breakfast, with a time for quiet reflection and prayer. Also, at our Locust Knoll Friends School we had to memorize verses from the Bible and recite them before going to meeting at 10:30 every Fifth Day morning. This constituted our religious instruction in our community, in place of the Sunday Schools of other churches. Added to this was my mother's teaching about proper behavior and spiritual practice, passed along in part by her method of childhood discipline.
When I was eight or nine years old, I clearly initiated a deceptive act that soon caught up with me. Howard Cope's gas station and auto repair shop was located within easy walking distance of our home. Because Howard Cope, a disaffected member of our meeting, also sold chewing tobacco, cigars and cigarettes, and because one could expect to hear swearing and bad language used at the garage, it was a place my parents did not want me to go. There were times, however, when I had to run errands there. I had clear instructions not to hang around.
My misdeed was to make unannounced trips to Cope's Garage. When no one was looking I would quietly sneak in and grab a handful of match packets from the counter, which of course were free for those who smoked. At the time I tried to justify my actions by reminding myself that I was taught that the use of tobacco in any form was a sin, so maybe I was helping to restrain this evil practice! I continued to run off with the matches until one day my mother discovered a large pile of them under my bed in my upstairs room. I had been caught red-handed and was forced to give my mother a full explanation.
My mother was wise in how she dealt with me. She collected the matches and said I should go with her to Howard Cope and apologize to him for what I had done. That was a very hard thing
for me to do, but I did go with her and, after my apology, I felt shamed but forgiven and reconciled. Nevertheless, the experience taught me a lesson that has served me well ever since.
Uncle Cyrus, who sat on the bench above and behind my father and me in meeting, did speak often in meeting. He ministered in the traditional Con-servative sing-song style, and I well remember him quaking with the power of the Spirit as he spoke. We children sometimes tried to reproduce those experiences as we "played" meeting for worship later for our own entertainment.
Just as powerful for me were mid-week meetings on Fifth Day when usually nothing was spoken. People would close businesses at mid-morning and children would come from school for those meetings. You could sometimes really tell the moving of the Spirit. There was a genuine sense of the moving of the presence of Christ in our midst, which left us with a feeling of spiritual unity-what Friends have called "a covered meeting." I learned that from very early on.
These excerpts are from Chapter 3 of Wilmer A.Cooper's newest book, Growing Up Plain, from Friends United Press, released summer of 1999, reproduced by permission. The book is available from Quaker Hill Bookstore for $16.50 (paper). Call 1(800) 537-8838.
Copyright (c) 1999 Friends United Press
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