Guest Column

Everything's up to date in little Cooper, Iowa, or so it seems to this ''hard-core post-modern urbanite'' from Kansas City

The author has lived and worked around the world, in the bright lights of TV and screenplay production. But he has such fond memories of his boyhood stays at his grandparents’ farm outside just outside Cooper that he’s become a frequent visitor as an adult to our town, which now has a population of about 30. In fact, he says he’ll likely become a Cooperite himself eventually! —Chuck Offenburger

By Christopher Klinzman
February 7, 2005
KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI

Last year on Memorial Day weekend, I spent time on the beautiful Raccoon River Valley Trail around the town of Cooper, Iowa, and later I drove by “Simple Serenity Farm” during its renovations. The rural neighborhood was already abuzz at the prospect of the Offenburgers moving in soon.

Now, it is so charming to read Chuck’s columns and Carla’s updates in “Offenburgers’ Farm Journal.” I particularly enjoyed the recent stories about the Raccoon River Valley Trail and the recollection about the late Johnny Carson’s role in the Cooper Centennial in 1981.

I was there for that celebration, having just returned from living with my parents overseas. I will never forget the crowd in Cooper that day. It was SRO in that little town, with traffic backed up in all directions.

As a kid I spent a lot of time in and around Cooper. My grandparents were Frank and Marjorie Gilmore who lived on the Century Farm with the white barns, located a half-mile west of Cooper.

They both passed away early last summer, within two weeks of each other. So in late May and June, I wound up making four trips from Kansas City, where I now live, to the Cooper area. The first was on Memorial Day weekend, then a week later I returned for the annual Klinzman Family Reunion in nearby Bagley, where many on that side of my family lived for decades, and of course I came back for the two funerals.

Sadly, it’s the most I’ve ever visited Greene County in a single year.

Carla’s January 24th Farm Journal update told how the delegation of three Cooperities appeared on Carson’s “Tonight Show” in 1981 to talk about the upcoming centennial. It was really funny, and Johnny was very gracious to his guests.


Christopher Klinzman, who works in TV, video and movie production in Kansas City, says he's got his spot picked out for eventually living around Cooper, Iowa. Why? The ''simple pleasures from a time seemingly past'' have hooked him. This photo of him, doing camera work at a Kansas City Royals baseball game, was shot by his late grandfather Frank Gilmore, of Cooper.

Myrtle Whitcher, one of the designated celebrities, worked for my Grandpa Frank for years and was a good family friend. She was kind of a pioneer lady, the first “single, working woman” I ever met. She drove the Cooper school bus for nearly 40 years, endearing herself to generations. She’d wear those old bibbed overalls, and work like one of the men in the fields. Myrtle was a very skilled tractor and combine driver, working for Frank and also for Willard Hostetler who farms the land now, until at least the late 1980s or early ’90s.

My grandfather and Gerald Lawton, another of the famous “Tonight Show” guests, had an intense feud in the late 1950s over the consolidation of the Cooper school. It was legendary in our family, with Frank favoring consolidation with Jefferson (“It’s the future – better schools for our kids”) and Gerald wanting to maintain the small K-12 school in Cooper (“It’ll kill the town to consolidate”). Their disagreement actually turned into a fistfight.

As it turned out, both were right.

The vote to consolidate Cooper into the school district in the county seat of Jefferson, passed by one vote.

My mom, who had just finished her junior year when the Cooper high school closed, had a bittersweet experience of it. She was a basketball star, wearing number 13 for the Cooper Cardinals. “Jeff” didn’t have girls’ hoops, so she missed that tremendously, but she says her senior year there at Jefferson Community High School was the best year she ever had in school. And Grandpa Frank has his name on the wall in the foyer of the high school building in Jefferson for his efforts.

Over the years that followed, Gerald and Frank rarely spoke.

But I took Grandpa into the Cooper Post Office in the mid-1990s when Gerald’s wife Dot Lawton was running it, and Gerald happened to be there, too. I wanted Frank to show me the trophy of the (I think!) 1925 Greene County basketball tournament, which Cooper won by beating Jefferson in the finals. It was the biggest victory ever by Cooper High School, they would say.

He and Gerald looked at the old trophies together, and reminisced about the consolidation days. Both were very sweet and conciliatory, for two tough old lions, and it was touching to witness, there in front of the trophy case that both families had helped fill years ago.

Frank told me a lot of great stories from the area.

There was the time the Cooper town basketball team beat the Harlem Globetrotters, circa 1928. During their early barnstorming days the ’Trotters played a game in Jefferson on a Saturday afternoon, won it and then went to Cooper to play the second end of a doubleheader that evening. As was the practice, the Globetrotters, out of Chicago then, let the rubes get a big first half lead. After performing some of the now notorious halftime stunts like stealing a lady’s purse, which must have seemed outrageous to the community at the time, the Globetrotters would storm back to victory in the second half. But in Cooper, they failed in their patented comeback. The Cooper town team actually beat what basketball historians consider one of the best professional squads of that era.

Another of his stories was about the train wreck at the bridge over the North Raccoon River between Cooper and Jefferson. That old rail line is now the Raccoon River Valley Trail, and you can still see the damage on the main trestle at the south end of the old steel bridge spanning the river. The wreck happened when the engineer cornered the little bend too fast coming out of Jefferson. The cars began to sway from side to side, one of them catching the trestle with its top front corner, and smashing the car. Cars that followed fell into the river and the bridge had to be rebuilt. Farmers from all over the area were called in to use their tractors to pull the train cars from the river.

One of Klinzman's favorite spots along the Raccoon River Valley Trail is the old railroad bridge over the North Raccoon River. The obvious dent in the trestle on the left always reminds him of one of the stories his grandfather Frank Gilmore used to tell him.

I’ve heard stories of how Cooper had stores, a barbershop, train station, a grain elevator which I remember myself, and other amenities. My mom remembers boarding a passenger train at Cooper to go visit an aunt in Boone. And, of course, the Great Cooper Fire of November 27, 1921, from which the town never really re-emerged in its thriving form.

While visiting for Grandma Marjorie’s funeral last summer, I saw people making some kind of preparations at the Cooper Community Building, which was the old gymnasium at the school. I walked in, not having been in the building for years. The gym was transformed with lights and balloons, and it looked really magical. I was surprised the old building was still in use. People there said it was for a wedding reception, and it looked wonderful.

It was particularly interesting in the recent columns to learn that this April 9, there will be a “Cooper High School Prom,” the first since 1959, with the theme of “The Way We Were.” My mom was at that ’59 prom as Martha Gilmore. So now, I have to go to the ’05 prom, having seen how cool the place looks decorated. And, besides, I always wanted a reason to buy a pair of saddle shoes!

I grew up from ages 8 to 18 living overseas, as my parents traveled professionally, my dad David Klinzman in the computer industry and my mom Martha Gilmore Klinzman Brooks a food writer and journalist. Both of them small-town Iowans, they traveled the world in cutting-edge businesses, their roots always serving them well in competitive environs.

I had chances to return regularly to the Cooper and Bagley area, by myself from age 11 onward, to see both sets of my grandparents, who lived only miles apart until 1981. As such, I grew to think of the area very fondly, and still regard it as one of my favorite spots on the planet.

Squirrel Hollow Park, on the National Historic Register. The bike trail. The railroad bridge. The North Raccoon and its sandbars. The Greene County Historical Museum. The Mahanay Memorial Bell Tower. The Jefferson A & W.

All simple pleasures from a time seemingly past, especially to a hard-core post-modern urbanite like myself.

But I plan to visit the area again this year on Memorial Day, and the following weekend for the Klinzman Family Reunion in Bagley, and the Bell Tower Festival in Jefferson.

And before that, I’m going to be there for the “Cooper High School Prom.” Attending high school overseas, like I did, I never got to go to an American high school prom, so this will be good for a make-up class in pop culture, not to mention a continuation of tradition. It’ll be like “Back to the Future” for me!

I agree with Chuck Offenburger, that towns like Cooper could be the future, again. I plan to live in the area upon retirement. I already have my spot picked out. See you on the bike trail!

Christopher Klinzman, 42, is a television director-photographer, screenwriter and Emmy-nominated filmmaker based in Kansas City, Missouri. He trained and worked professionally in South Africa before attending film and theater school at Diablo Valley College in California, then graduating in 1987 from the excellent radio and TV program at Northwest Missouri State University in Maryville. He worked at local TV stations in the Midwest as a cameraman, editor, director and commercial writer-producer before moving into sports TV photography. He does that now on a freelance basis, working with the regional and national networks. Since 1994, that work has included coverage of Kansas City Royals baseball, and he’s also involved on telecasts of Big 12 Conference basketball. In addition, he works as an independent filmmaker, utilizing TV as the main form of distribution. He has his own state-of-the-art digital editing system and camera gear, with which he can produce commercials and other smaller video projects. For movies and other large projects, he partners with others, generally in the Midwest. “As an independent producer, I try to utilize the various high-end resources in the Midwest region rather than trying to facilitate a high-end studio and staff myself,” Klinzman explained. “I can hire these services, like $100,000 high definition cameras, or top freelance photographers, for just as long as I need them. It’s much more cost effective for the big projects, rather than buying all the quipment myself, no matter what the electronics magazines try to tell you. On the other hand, everything that used to need a $3 million editing suite 10 years ago can now be done on my basement Mac. So it’s a very interesting time.” Samples of his work can be seen online at www.cVideo.net. You can e-mail him at cklinzman@cVideo.net

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