Louise Mary Bohn Cooper was born on November 18, 1929, to Charles and Olive Bohn in Sentinel Butte, North Dakota at the height of the Great Depression. She was the 4th of 14 children in the family (11 of whom survived infancy). Times were tough on the family farm necessitating her moving to Glendive, MT for her senior year of high school. In Glendive, she was a live-in homemaker for a local physician.
After high school, she was encouraged by her parents to pursue higher education. She enrolled with her sister, Charlotte, at Dickinson State Teacher’s College. She obtained her teaching certificate two years later and began a lifetime of elementary school teaching in Hettinger, North Dakota.
She married W.T. (Dub) Cooper, Jr. on June 1st 1950 in Sentinel Butte. She became a homemaker raising her son, W. Thomas, III, and daughter, Geraldine Marie, while Dub worked with his dad in the family Chevrolet dealership in Culbertson, MT. After a couple of years, Dub was asked by his uncle I.C. to help build a trailer park for workers relocating to the Columbia Basin of Washington State for the construction of Priest Rapids Dam. The town of Mattawa was nearly formed and the only person in town with teaching credentials was Louise! She obtained an emergency Washington State Teaching Certificate which she renewed annually until she obtained a permanent certificate when Tom was a Junior in High School. The first year, she taught grades one to eight in a converted Quonset hut. The next year, Mattawa had substantial growth and built a new school with four teachers. Dub also worked as a cement finisher helper on the dam and drove the town school bus.
When the dam was finished, the family moved to Quincy, a booming town due to the newly arrived irrigation water from Grand Coulee Dam. Louise taught at Mountain View Elementary School until about 1970 when she was offered early retirement by Washington State. She was often on the vanguard of new teaching techniques including teaching math with Cuneiform rods and using an innovative alphabet which had separate characters for each of the sounds, so her children were not confused by long or soft sounds or silent letters. She opened a children’s dress shop in Quincy in addition to selling Mary Kay Cosmetics after her first retirement. After a few years, she moved to Hawthorne, Nevada to resume her teaching career with her sisters, Charlotte and Marlyn.
She enjoyed her tulip and rose gardens, cooking, as well as a raucous game of pinochle, cribbage or bridge. She traveled extensively with her sisters. After retirement, she spent many winters at The Resort in Mesa, Arizona, where she was near her sister, Annanelle. She spent her summers with Gery in Sonoma, CA. When her health deteriorated, she moved to Sonoma where she spent the last years of her life.
She is survived by her siblings: Ted, Eleanor, Marlyn, Maxine and Gerald; her children, Tom of Kennewick, WA and Gery of Sonoma, CA; her grandchildren, Ann, Lea, and Alexa; and greatgrandchildren, Isabella, Sam, and Max. She was preceded in death by her parents and siblings: Dan, Charlotte, Charles, Pat, Annanelle, and the three little boys.
She died peacefully on August 31, 2024 in Sonoma of complications of dementia.
We wish to thank the staff of Green Acres in Kenwood, CA for their fantastic care of mom over the past two years and the staff of Sutter Hospice.
A Burial and Committal Service will be at 11 a.m., Friday, October 4, 2024 in the family plot in St. Michael’s Cemetery, Sentinel Butte with Deacon Robert Bohn presiding. A luncheon will follow the service at St. John the Baptist Catholic Church, Beach.
