Beverly Jean Cooper

Beverly Jean Cooper passed away on April 16, 2019, at the Elm Crest Nursing Home in Harlan, Iowa. She was born on May 2, 1934, to parents John W. and Mary O. (Niles) Cooper in Mondamin, Iowa. She graduated from Mondamin High School and completed her Bachelor of Arts in English at Wayne State Teachers College in 1955. She went on to earn a masters degree in psychology and counseling at Kearney State College in 1968. She once said, “If I were wealthy, I’d be a perpetual student. Learning is terribly exciting to me.”

Bev’s career as a teacher came to an abrupt end during her first year of teaching when she was involved in a serious car accident. She experienced multiple injuries to both legs, a fractured hip which went undetected for 16 months and other broken bones. Many surgeries followed through the years.

She was employed by Christian Home in Council Bluffs before moving to Hastings, Nebraska, where she first worked as a housemother in a residence hall at Hastings College. After working for some years for the J. M. McDonald Company, she began a long career with the Nebraska Job Service in Hastings, first as an interviewer and later as the manager. In addition to helping thousands of people find employment, she took on leadership and support posts with many organizations: Child Development Council of Adams County; Crisis Line; chairperson of the business and clerical division at Central Technical Community College, and Hastings Community Theater. She served as vice president and program chair of the Women’s Division of the Hastings Chamber of Commerce—and was reportedly encouraged to run for mayor, although she declined due to health reasons.

Bev’s faith played a central role in her life. As she recovered from her car accident, she wrote, “I promised the Lord that if He would let me walk out of the hospital, I would spend the rest of my life doing what He wanted me to do.” She was a long-time member of the First Presbyterian Church of Hastings, which in 1990 hosted a young minister from Romania who toured the United States to raise money to build a new Presbyterian church in his home town of Oradea. Bev contributed money for the purchase of a new electronic organ for that church, dedicated to the memory of her parents, and later assisted several of the minister’s children in pursuing their studies at Hastings College.

Bev received great satisfaction from her work for the Easter Seal Society, saying, “I’m very fond of the Easter Seal Society because it does help those who can’t help themselves.” She was chairperson for the Adams County Easter Seal Society for Crippled Children and Adults and in 1974 became the first recipient of the Fred Kuethe Memorial Award as the “Outstanding Humanitarian of Nebraska.” She was also named Hastings Beta Sigma Phi’s 1974 Woman of the Year and in 1975 was named the Hastings Daily Tribune’s “Tribland Woman of the Year.”

She was “Aunt Bev” to seventeen nephews and nieces, all of whom resigned themselves to her insistence that they pose for pictures at every family gathering. Her passion for photography was invested in the other great interest of her life, Nebraska author Willa Cather. Bev traveled the United States and England, documenting sites featured in Cather’s novels and locations where she lived and was buried. Much of her Cather memorabilia was donated to the University of Nebraska at Lincoln.

Bev was preceded in death by her parents, by her brother Harold, by her oldest sister and brother-in-law, Mary Ada and Robert Barber, and by nieces Glenda Barber and Mary Ruth Barber. She is survived by sisters Donna (Dale) Messenger and Myrna (Leroy) Cooper and by 15 nephews and nieces.

Visitation is Friday, May 24, 2019 from 10:00-11:00 a.m. at the Hoy-Kilnoski Funeral Home with a memorial service beginning at 11:00 a.m. Inurnment will be later that afternoon in the Magnolia, Iowa cemetery. The family will direct memorials.