Charles A. “Chuck” Cooper passed away peacefully at home in New Canaan, CT on Monday, April 20th at the age of 92.
Chuck Cooper
Chuck was born on Dec. 23, 1933 to Art and Betty Greenabaum Shires. His father was a talented and colorful first baseman for the Chicago White Sox who called himself “Art the Great.” His mother was 22 and had dropped out of college at 19 to marry his father. When Chuck was two his parents separated and he never saw his father again.
In 1940 he was formally adopted by Betty’s second husband, S Robert Cooper, and raised in Highland Park, IL. He graduated from the Todd School for Boys in Woodstock, IL where a chance meeting with Orson Welles, a graduate of the same school, convinced him to attend a college with a highly-rated drama program. He chose Swarthmore College in PA and excelled not only in drama but also in academics and sports, playing on three varsity teams for all four of his undergraduate years.
At the end of his senior year Chuck had to choose between a scholarship to attend the Yale School of Drama or a PhD program at MIT. He chose the latter. Even so, he would enjoy one more acting stint, in Geneva, Switzerland, where in 1959 he starred in the English language premiere of “Look Back in Anger.” His performance earned him a favorable review in the local newspaper, which referred to him as an actor of “trés grandes qualités.”
During the months spent in Switzerland he was also a ringer on the Oxford University’s traveling basketball team and spent weekends skiing in the Swiss alps. Skiing was a passion he’d discovered in college and which earned him some notoriety after he survived a nearly fatal run-in with a crevasse on Mount Washington in 1955 in New Hampshire; it was covered by the Boston Globe in an article entitled “Skier Cheats Death.”
In 1960 Chuck earned his PhD from MIT and went to work for Walter Heller, the Kennedy Administration’s chief economist. He left in early 1963 to join the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica CA as a researcher on national security and international economic issues. During this time he met and married Janis Stone and in 1966 they welcomed their first child, Elizabeth.
In the late 1960s Chuck was sent to Laos with the US AID program and subsequently became the U.S. Minister for Economic Affairs in South Vietnam, the last American to hold that position. He and his growing family (Elizabeth had been joined by siblings Melora and Jared) returned to Washington, DC in 1972 when he was named Deputy Assistant to the President for International Economic Affairs. In 1974 he joined the US Treasury Department as Assistant Secretary for International Affairs.
In 1976 Chuck joined the Exxon Corporation in New York and held several positions, including Deputy Treasurer, before being named a Vice President of Esso Europe in London in 1984. In the same year he and his second wife, Margaret Earl Cooper, welcomed a son, Jonathan. Chuck retired from Exxon in 1986 and returned to the Rand Corporation as a consultant on NATO and Russia interactions.
After moving to New Canaan in 1992, Chuck joined several mining start-ups, mostly in Central Asis which, thanks to the brief period known as perestroika, were in areas newly opened to Western investors. In the early 1990s he co-founded Oxus Mining in eastern Uzbekistan, which was nationalized by the local government following the US invasion of Afghanistan.
The end of Oxus was also the end of Chuck’s career. In 2001 he was diagnosed with probably Alzheimer’s and forced to curtail his extensive business travel regimen. That didn’t stop him from traveling with family or doing what he loved best: skiing, reading, studying Russian, gardening and cooking for family and friends.
He is greatly missed.
Chuck is survived by his second wife, Margaret, and two of his four children, Elizabeth Starr Cooper of Los Angeles and Jonathan Kinsley Cooper of Denver. He is also survived by four grandchildren, including Charles and Maya Newson and Olivia and Sophia Vo. He was predeceased by a daughter, Melora Christina Cooper, and a son, Jared Alexander Cooper.
The family wishes to thank all the emergency services in New Canaan, especially the New Canaan Police Department and New Canaan EMS. It also wants to thank the Radiology Department of Norwalk Hospital, Regional Hospice Care of Danbury, First Presbyterian Church of New Canaan and Hoyt Funeral Home, as well as the practice of Dr Thomas A Cigno in Ridgefield.