George Cooper has had a variety of careers. He spent most of his first twenty-five adult years as a law professor at Columbia University, and as a civil rights lawyer during the 1960-70s heyday of that reform movement. Mr. Cooper was the founder of the Clinical Law Program at Columbia, raising funds and convincing a conservative faculty to support a significant innovation in legal education. He spent 1979 in South Africa, where he helped with the establishment of the Legal Resources Centre, an anti-apartheid legal aid program.
But a wanderer at heart, he often strayed from the career straight-and-narrow. After finishing law school, he first spent a year traveling in Europe, India and East Africa before commencing legal work. He holds a Certificate in Celestial Navigation from the Hayden Planetarium and has navigated small boats across big oceans, sometimes solo.
For a time in the 1990’s he turned to non-fiction writing, and published two deeply researched historic true crime stories, garnering praise like “vivid personalities become the basis of a near-operatic, true-life tale… handled with Victorian delicacy” (New York Times). See links to Lost Love and Poison Widows in this site.
Since 2000, he has devoted himself to non-profit arts projects. He was deeply involved in establishing the Tropic Cinema, a three-screen art movie house in his hometown of Key West, for which he served as founding Chairman, Treasurer and general overseer. In 2016, with his wife Judy Blume, he helped found Books&Books at The Studios, also in Key West, where you can find copies of his now out-of-print books.
He’s also known to family and friends as the oldest IT guy around. His life motto, when faced with difficulty, is “turn it off and turn it on again.”
Mr. Cooper has been ensconced (or is it “enconched”) in Key West with his wife for the past twenty-five years, and he has been officially named by the City and County as an “Honorary Conch and Citizen of the Florida Keys” for his support of the arts.
For more info, check his proposed obituary.