Ken_Cooper

After graduation Tom Bergstedt and I went directly to
Tulane University summer school to get a running start
on college. In 1958 I married Rena Murphy who had
moved from Sulphur to Morgan City before our senior
year in high school. In 1959 my daughter Rachel was
born and in 1960 I graduated with a BS degree in
physics. I took a job with GE and moved to Cincinnati,
Ohio where my son Ken Jr. was born in 1961. After one
year in Cincinnati designing a nuclear powered
airplane (don’t laugh, I’m serious) and going to grad
school at the University of Cincinnati I escaped to
Schenectady, New York, home of the Knolls Atomic
Power Laboratory. There I spent the next 38 years
going to grad school at RPI in Troy, NY and designing
and testing nuclear power plants for Navy submarines
and aircraft carriers. I didn’t spend 38 years in grad
school, just the first 4 or 5, but later I did become a
licensed Professional Engineer in New York State and
did a little private practice on the side so it seemed
like school was part of the mix for a long time. In 1969
I became divorced (I was probably the only one who
was surprised) and in 1979 I met Anne Young from
Amsterdam, NY and began a relationship that lasted 25
years. I retired in 1999 and Anne and I and Duke the
dog moved to Henderson, Nevada in 2000. Anne
needed to get to a dry climate for health reasons and
this was a dry climate that just happened to be near
Las Vegas. Anne passed away in 2004 and Duke and I
are now living a life of leisure in the desert which is
about as different from the south coast of Louisiana as
you can get. My daughter and granddaughter, Rachel
and Caitlin, still live in Schenectady and my son and his
wife Julie and my grandchildren Austin and Annabelle
live in Boca Raton, Florida so there is probably a lot of
travel in my future.