Hard times add to burden of family barely getting by
Published: December 07, 2009, 3:20 pm
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For years, Gary E. Cooper Jr. has worked a string of temporary jobs in factories and warehouses.
Sometimes the jobs last quite a while. At other times, he finds himself without work for weeks at a stretch.
But even when times are good, he brings home less than $300 a week. More than a third of each paycheck goes toward rent on the family’s three-bedroom apartment, in the shadow of the Thruway in West Seneca.
The Coopers patch things together with the help of food stamps and the Home Energy Assistance Program. But even going downtown for appointments to get those services can be challenging.
At more than $2 each way, bus fare can make a hefty dent in such a tight budget.
“I walk everywhere,” said Cooper’s wife, Mary A. Even trips to the grocery store are taken on foot.
For several weeks, Gary Cooper, 46, has been working a temporary job at Robinson Home Products, six miles from home. Because the family’s Pontiac Sunfire was repossessed in May, he rides his bike to and from work.
After quitting her job as a housekeeper at a nursing home, Mary Cooper, 41, decided this year to pursue her dream of working as a cosmetologist in a funeral home.
“I would love to do hair and makeup on dead people,” she said.
“It would be a perfect job, because the customers would never complain,” she joked, always ready to share a laugh.
She enrolled at the Continental School of Beauty, three miles from her house.
But the last bus on Seneca Street leaves just after 9 p. m., so she had to leave school an hour early every night. That, she said, didn’t sit well with her instructors.
For the past three weeks, she was sick and wasn’t able to go to school, she said. That led to more bad news.
“I just got expelled,” she said. “Now I don’t know what I’m going to do. I want to work a third-shift job, but it’s got to be close by. Buses are expensive.”
The Coopers’ children — Gary, 20, and Shelby, who turned 18 today — echo their mother’s easy sense of humor, her devotion to her family — and her uncertainty about what to do next.
Both talk about going to college — Gary, to learn to design video games or study photography, and Shelby, to study zoology. But neither has much of a plan.
The Coopers are among the hundreds of families that would be helped through donations to The News Neediest Fund.
During last year’s drive, The News Neediest Fund, administered by the United Way, served more than 12,000 families and 14,000 children through distribution of $700,000 worth of toys and food.
After getting his general equivalency diploma, the son joined the Marines. Just a couple of months after his arrival on Parris Island, he fell and injured his shoulder. He got an honorable discharge, then was sent home for surgery and physical therapy.
Since he recuperated, he has worked a few jobs, including a temporary position and stints at a couple of McDonald’s. None has lasted.
Now, he says, he might apply to become a dishwasher, or he might re-enlist with the Marines. He hasn’t decided.
Shelby attended West Seneca West High School, but said she tired of the constant bullying.
“I just got sick of going to school and getting ridiculed,” she said. She has transferred to a GED program.
“Right now, I stay home and help out as much as I can,” she said.
Much of her time is devoted to caring for her 11-month-old cousin Dylan, who, with his mother, Kim Green, lives with the Coopers.
Green, 28, and Dylan moved in over the summer, when they needed a place to stay.
“People said, ‘Where are you going to put her and the baby?’ I said, ‘We’ll make room,’ ” Mary Cooper said.
And they did.
With no extra bedrooms in their modest apartment, Gary and Mary Cooper moved their bed and dresser into the living room, which has become their bedroom.
Green works a few hours a day at Dunkin Donuts. Mary or Shelby Cooper look after Dylan while she works.
This is hardly the first time the Coopers have gone out of their way to help someone in the family. For nine years, Mary Cooper cared for her mother, Mary Ann Parker, who lost both legs to amputations below the knee. For years, the Coopers lived upstairs from her mother, an arrangement that made it easier to provide the help she needed.
When Parker died three years ago, the Coopers grieved for the woman who loved to cook and bake and keep her family laughing.
Their sense of loss was compounded, though, when they found out that her house — Mary’s Cooper’s childhood home and the house where she and her husband had raised their own children—was heavily mortgaged.
“She always said the house was paid for,” Mary Cooper said. “Well, it wasn’t.”
A real estate agent advised them the debt was equal to the value of the house, and the Coopers decided to let the bank take the house.
They moved into the first-floor apartment, where they still live. Sitting in the living room, Mary Cooper’s smile fades when she talks about the family’s circumstances.
“Ever since we’ve moved in here, it’s been hell,” she said. “We have good luck for a little bit, then we have to jump through a hurdle.”
The car was repossessed last spring. The phone was shut off two months ago. The washer and dryer just broke. Winter utility bills loom large.
The family is hoping that the father’s temporary job will lead to something permanent. For now, they hold tight to their love for one another.
“You’ve just got to smile and laugh every day; otherwise, you go crazy,” Mary Cooper said.
mpasciak@buffnews.com
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