Georgiana Cooper's words pure gold - and so was she

I had an email a few weeks ago from a man named Larry Richardson who mentioned a long-time connection he had to the old Portales News-Tribune, a favorite aunt of his.

“She was probably before your time,” Richardson wrote, “but you may have heard of her…Georgiana Cooper. She actually published a book from the many public interest columns she wrote.”

Not only had I heard of her, but I remembered her well, as do many others in this community, I’m sure.

Richardson said his family called her “Aunt Georgie,” but to me she was Mrs. Cooper.

Georgiana Cooper’s book, “Idle Chatter,” was a collection extracted from her newspaper columns of the same name that appeared in the Portales Daily News, then later the Portales News-Tribune, in a career that lasted from 1956 to 1983.

I had the opportunity to share the newsroom with Cooper for a few months in 1982. She was nearing the end of her career when I was hired as a summer reporter between my junior and senior years of college.

She had celebrated her 76th birthday a few months before I started there, but she came in person to the office each week to bang out her columns.

Besides penning Idle Chatter, she also spent hours combing through newspapers to compile “Turning Back the Calendar,” a weekly look back at highlights from 70, 60, 50, 40, 30, 20, and 10 years ago, respectively.

Her columns were filled with the goings-on of her family and friends, as well as wry observations of life and memories of her own pioneer parents.

She also took the occasional photo that was published in the newspaper, including one that was picked up by The Associated Press and appeared in newspapers across the country: A snapshot of a cat with kittens under a road sign that read, “Unlawful to litter $100 fine.”

“She was very proud of the nationally published picture of the mamma cat and her kittens under the no littering road sign,” her nephew remembered. “She certainly had an eye for irony and humor.”

I hadn’t read my copy of “Idle Chatter” for a while, but I pulled it off the shelf after hearing from Richardson, and was reminded again why this column was as popular as it was for so many years.

Cooper had a chatty style and a wide acquaintance in the community, not to mention reams of material from growing up with a farmer dad and a mother who was a frontier midwife.

Initially hired as the society editor for the newspaper (a position from a more gracious era of humanity), Cooper said in her book that the idea for the Idle Chatter column came about by accident, after she wrote a popular feature about unusual names of individuals living in the Portales area.

“We have Kings, Dukes, Popes, Bishops, Nunns, and Monks,” she wrote in 1956. “Some of our citizens are Wise, some Smart. There’s a Garten for the Gardener. You can have your choice of a Golden or a Silvertooth. Although it’s a dry country, we have Clouds and Rains, Rainwater, Snow, Frost, and Hale.”

Thank you, Larry Richardson, for reminding me of your remarkable Aunt Georgie, and also for giving me an excuse to revisit her words.

Cooper died in 1986 at the age of 80. Looking back over the almost 40 years since she retired from her column, I might have to argue that her words were neither “idle” nor “chatter.”

They were pure gold.

And so was she.

Betty Williamson has another dozen years of writing to catch up to Mrs. Cooper … if she can. Reach her at:

[email protected]