Remembering my favorite teacher, Mr. Cooper, and lessons for a lifetime

We all have an all-time favorite teacher. Mine was Lynn G. Cooper – Mr. Cooper – and I was devastated and heartbroken to hear the news this week that he had passed away at the age of 78.

Mr. Cooper was my band teacher when I was growing up in Ypsilanti, starting in fifth grade and going all the way through high school. I had a few other band teachers along the way in middle school, but Mr. Cooper was always the man in charge.

He taught me the difference between a quarter-note and a half-note. He taught me what “pianissimo” means. He taught me how to march.

He also taught me how to be a leader, and most of all, how to treat other people.

My story is not unique. Thousands of other kids who graduated from Ypsilanti High School in the 1970s and ’80s will tell you the same thing. Mr. Cooper was the best. We loved him as a teacher, we learned so much from him, and we’re all heartbroken today.

Mr. Cooper grew up in Ypsilanti, like me, and he went to the University of Michigan, like me. He was also in the Michigan Marching Band like me, and in 1965, he was the band’s drum major. (Yes, he really was that short.)

A few years later, he found himself back in Ypsilanti as a band teacher. My first encounter with Mr. Cooper came in the fall of my fifth-grade year, when all the prospective band kids gathered in the gymnasium for “Instrument Selection Day.”

I’m not sure how it worked at your school when it came to picking what instrument you were going to play for the rest of your life, but the way it worked in 1970 at Estabrook Elementary School was that Mr. Cooper had a blackboard at the front of the room with all the instruments listed on it – clarinet, trumpet, percussion, etc. Underneath each instrument name were some numbers – 1 through 5, 1 through 10, whatever. However many of that instrument he wanted in the band.

When you got to the front of the line, Mr. Cooper would ask you what instrument you wanted to play, and if there was any space left in that group, he’d write your name down.

Like most of the boys, I wanted to play either trumpet or alto sax. The cool instruments. I was even willing to try percussion.

I was at the very end of the line, though, so by the time I got to Mr. Cooper, all the cool instruments were filled up. The only spaces left were for trombone and something called “euphonium.” (I thought he had made that name up, but it turns out he didn’t.)

“What’s your name?” Mr. Cooper said.

“Buddy Moorehouse,” I said.

“What do you want to play?”

“Trumpet or saxophone.”

“I’m sorry, both of those are full. How about trombone?”

“Trombone? Really?”

“Yes, it’s not bad at all. You’ll like it.”

So he wrote my name down under “Trombone” and that’s how I forever became a trombonist.

There were a few other band teachers in the Ypsilanti school system back then, so during middle school, we didn’t always have Mr. Cooper. By the time I got to high school, though, I had him full-time for marching band.

And I loved marching band in high school. Loved it. Truth be told, I didn’t love playing the trombone, but I loved marching band. I loved the trips, I loved the games, I semi-loved parades and I mostly loved band camp.

Back then, the Ypsilanti Marching Band would go to band camp every summer at Interlochen, the famed music camp near Traverse City. Those weeks were the best weeks of my life.

As a high school freshman in the fall of 1974, the week at band camp was my first real exposure to how Mr. Cooper was going to be as a band instructor. Back in elementary school, he was mostly just teaching us how to hold our instruments and read music. Now that we were in high school, though, we were there to work.

Mr. Cooper always made band so much fun, but he also took no crap from anyone. He was maybe 5-foot-5, but we were all scared to death of him.

He had two favorite expressions, and anyone who was in the Ypsilanti High School Marching Band can tell you what they were.

The first was “Don’t fidget.”

When the band was standing at attention, the idea was that you were supposed to be AT ATTENTION. You weren’t supposed to be adjusting your hat or shifting your feet or playing with your music. You were supposed to be at attention. And that meant not moving one muscle.

So to get the point across, Mr. Cooper would say “Don’t fidget.” He’d say it again and again and again, until every single member of the band stopped fidgeting.

His second favorite expression, and I’m sure he stole this from someone, was “To be early is to be on time. To be on time is to be late.”

As much as that doesn’t make logical sense, it sure made sense to us. If we were supposed to be on the field at noon, that didn’t mean we were supposed to be on the field at noon. It meant we were supposed to be on the field at 11:55. If you showed up right at noon, you would get a glare that you did not ever want to get.

As a grown man, I’m not someone who is renowned for his punctuality, but that’s no fault of Mr. Cooper. I will never ever, for the rest of my life, forget that to be early is to be on time and to be on time is to be late.

So while that lesson might not have stuck, plenty of other lessons that I learned from Mr. Cooper did stick.

Foremost among them is this: Treat every single person you meet with kindness and respect. Whether you were the first-chair flute or the last-chair trombone (me), Mr. Cooper treated every single one of his students the same way. With kindness and respect. And he made every single student in his band feel like they were just as important as everyone else.

I also learned most of what I know about leadership thanks to Mr. Cooper.

Back then, and it might be the same way now, the band elected its drum major every year. It was always just one person, it was always a senior and it was always a boy (hopefully THAT part has changed).

The drum major was the most revered position in the band. All the younger kids idolized the drum major, so consequently, it was a dream of almost every boy in the band that someday he would be the drum major.

So every spring, we would have drum major tryouts. Mr. Cooper would ask all the junior boys if they wanted to try out, and the ones who said yes would have to go through some training. And then all of them would go out in front of the whole band one at a time to audition.

As much as I thought it would be great to be the drum major, I had never given it much serious thought – mostly because I never thought I’d get it. But some friends convinced me to try out, so I figured what the heck.

Much to my shock and surprise, I was elected. The band elected me to be the Ypsilanti High School drum major for the 1977-78 school year.

When Mr. Cooper announced the results of the voting to the entire band, they all applauded. Then he asked me to come forward and he shook my hand and congratulated me.

As everyone was leaving, he pulled me aside.

“Congratulations, Buddy,” he said. “I think you’re going to do a great job.”

“Thanks, Mr. Cooper. But I don’t know.”

“Well, the band knows,” he said. “That’s why they voted for you.”

The way that Mr. Cooper ran his band, drum major was a true position of leadership. He didn’t just want someone to blow their whistle and wave their arms. You had to set an example, you had to make it fun for everyone, you had to keep them going at practice when they were tired and you had to hold everyone accountable. You had to be a leader – a true leader.

If a kid gets an opportunity like that as a high school senior, it sticks with you. For the rest of your life. It sure did with me.

Because Mr. Cooper had confidence in me, it gave me confidence in myself. That year I spent as the drum major of the Ypsilanti High School Marching Band taught me more about leadership than anything else I’ve ever done in my life.

All because of Mr. Cooper.

I officially took over as the drum major in August of 1977 when we went to Interlochen for band camp. I had spent the summer meeting with him and going to drum major camp in Indiana and getting all prepared.

The first day of band camp came and I was now the guy in charge. I had the whistle and the baton. This was now my band. It was so scary and so exciting.

This is one of my all-time favorite photos. It was taken during band camp that year, and you can see Mr. Cooper and me together.

I love this photo. That expression on his face seems to be saying, “Good God, they look AWFUL.” But he has a 17-year-old rookie drum major standing next to him, looking as confident and strong as can be.

I take this picture out and look at it from time to time, and it always makes me smile. It makes me smile because I remember how much fun that time was, and it makes me smile because it’s me and Mr. Cooper together.

My senior year was a blast, and the following year, I went off to the University of Michigan and joined the Michigan Marching Band, just like my idol Mr. Cooper had done.

I’ll never forget coming back to Ypsilanti High School in the fall of 1978, proudly wearing my Michigan Marching Band jacket.

“Look at you!” Mr. Cooper said.

“A dream come true, Mr. C!” I said. “All because you made me pick the trombone back in fifth grade.”

There were four of us in the Michigan Marching Band that year, four of his Ypsi kids, and I know that made him very, very happy. He was proud of every one of his students, but I know he was especially happy to see that.

That same year, my freshman year in college, Mr. Cooper started a new group called the Ypsilanti Community Band (which is still going strong as the Washtenaw Community Concert Band), and he invited his former students to join. I jumped at the chance to be in Mr. Cooper’s band once again.

I only spent one year in that band, and after my sophomore year at Michigan, I gave up marching band, as well. I was working as a sportswriter for the Michigan Daily by then and that was taking up too much of my time. I finally had to say goodbye to band.

A few years later, Mr. Cooper left Ypsilanti and took a job as the Director of Bands at Asbury College in Kentucky. That’s where he spent the rest of his career.

Thankfully, I got to see Mr. Cooper one more time. In 2009, the Ypsilanti Community Band was having a 30-year celebration concert, so they invited all of the members from the very first band (including me) to be there. They also invited Lynn Cooper to come up from Kentucky to direct the band.

It had been 31 years since I was his drum major at Ypsilanti High School. I was 48 and he was in his late 60s.

I saw him after the concert, shook his hand and said, “Hi, Mr. Cooper! It’s Buddy Moorehouse.”

“Buddy! How are you?”

Some of my classmates from Ypsi were also there, so we spent a few minutes laughing and telling old stories and letting him know that we still remember that to be early is to be on time and to be on time is to be late.

He laughed. “Good!” he said. “Don’t ever forget that.”

I also was able to thank him one more time for everything he’d given me, and to tell him that he was my all-time favorite teacher.

“Thank you,” he said. “I appreciate that more than you’ll know.”

That was the last time I saw him, and then the news came that he had passed away this week. I’m heartbroken and I will be forever.

I also hope Mr. Cooper knew that I was not alone. There are zillions of other kids from Ypsi – and probably zillions more from Asbury College – who loved him just as much as I did.

Thank you, Mr. C. Rest In Peace. We will never forget you.

For my Ypsilanti friends, I came across this old home movie that my dad shot at band camp in 1976, when I was a junior. Here’s Mr. Cooper doing what he did best.