Gordon Cowperthwaite
- Published: December 12, 2024
(Photo by Irwin Inman)
Working in his study late at night, his thoughts are interrupted by the thrilling rhythms coming from the television in the next room. Gordon leaps up and dashes into the family room and plops down in his favorite chair. Leaning forward, he starts patting his hands on his legs adding to the lively beat. It is Doc Severinsen and the Tonight Show Band playing one of their featured big band jazz numbers on “The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.” Big band is one of Gordon’s favorite genres of jazz, so whenever the Tonight Show Band plays, Gordon comes flying out of his study to watch, listen, and join the band. A jazz drummer himself, Gordon cannot resist adding his own percussive accents to their engaging melodies. What rhythm, what sound — Oh, yeaaah … !
Jazz is one of the sustaining threads running through Gordon’s life. Learning how to drum in his youth, listening to all types of jazz music, and performing with various jazz bands throughout his adulthood brought him endless joy.
Gordon was a lifelong lover of jazz, a lifelong learner and avid reader, and a lifetime friend and devoted father. Always a gentleman, he was gracious and thoughtful, with a wonderful, gentle sense of humor. He had an enormous ability for friendship, and for encouraging people to become their best. He was an excellent conversationalist. He valued kindness and caring for others, creativity and good writing, and taking care of his health. He cherished his two daughters, and always helped them any way he could.
Physical fitness was a lifetime priority of his. Every morning, he guzzled brewer’s yeast in tomato juice as well as wheat germ in skim milk, then ate fresh green salads with his low-fat lunches and dinners. He jogged outdoors until his eldest years, then switched to an indoor bicycle. He loved gardening with vegetables, fruits, flowers, shrubs and trees, and eating the fresh, nutritious bounty grown at home. In his later years when he could no longer grow and harvest his own food, he still nurtured his flower beds of daffodils, daylilies, and mixed perennials, as well as his favorite fern garden beside his backyard patio deck.
He had an artistic flair for many things, including layout and design, and creating elegant stoneware pots, bowls, plates, lamps and wall plaques. He also taught pottery for the Village Arts Council, and displayed his crafts at the Dayton Art Institute Museum’s outdoor summer art shows. His daughter Leslie fondly remembers attending these shows with him, and helping him lay out beautiful boards of weathered barn siding to showcase his handmade pottery. He introduced her to other artists and craftspeople also displaying their wares in booths across the lawn.
Gordon extended his creativity to home improvement projects, including gathering gray-weathered barn siding to panel our basement walls, building limestone retaining walls and steps around our house, and using red bricks from the dismantled old opera house on Dayton Street to build steps down our sloping lawn. He built furniture for our home, with the help of his father who taught him basic woodworking skills.
Born Sept. 18, 1924, in Detroit, Michigan, Gordon was the son of Thomas and Adrena Cowperthwaite, who immigrated from England and Scotland to Canada. After they married, they moved to Michigan, where their only child, Gordon, was born. His parents were active avocationally in musical comedy and in church choirs during their time in Canada, and also in Detroit for many years.
Gordon graduated from Cooley High School in June 1942, having earned a varsity letter in track and a music letter in chorus. He attended Michigan State College briefly until March of 1943. Unable to join the military service because of poor vision, he spent the war years, until 1945, working in a defense factory in Detroit. Although he knew he was supporting the military effort in essential ways, he wished he could do more. This desire to help increased his devotion to family, community and making a difference in people’s lives. It also spurred his passion for personal health — perhaps to prove to the army that he was fit in many other ways!
Gordon entered Antioch College during autumn 1945 and graduated in 1949 with a BA in business administration, focusing on marketing. He married Ruth Fortner, a fellow Antiochian, in 1947. While they were students they lived until his graduation in the infamous “Splinterville,” the colony of ancient, discarded U.S. Army trailers that the college provided for its growing number of married students. Rod and Carol Serling were their neighbors during this time.
His two daughters, Leslie and Jenifer, were born in Yellow Springs in 1950 and 1956, and completed high school here. Although Gordon and Ruth divorced in 1982 after 35 years of marriage, they remained friends and dedicated parents to their daughters. Gordon still occasionally greeted Ruth fondly as Honey or Dear, even in public, which sometimes startled people who knew they split up long ago. His love and respect for Ruth continued all his life. The night she died at age 97, our 98-year-old father was by her bedside, gently stroking her hand and saying goodbye.
After graduating from Antioch, Gordon remained living in Yellow Springs for the rest of his life. He worked briefly for an advertising agency in Springfield, then in late 1950, he left to join the advertising department at Rike-Kumler department store in Dayton as a copywriter. During his 24-year career at Rike’s, he progressed from copywriter, to art director, to creative director, and then to advertising manager for his final seven years at Rike’s.
In 1974, he joined the faculty at Sinclair Community College in Dayton, after earning his master’s degree in education, with a specialty in curriculum development, from Goddard College. He completed his Ph.D. in education, specializing in higher education administration, from the Union Institute in 1982. For most of his 25 years at Sinclair, Gordon helped develop and administer several nontraditional education programs, one involving independent study, and another granting students academic credit for relevant prior learning. He was also a faculty advisor for their cooperative education program. He retired from Sinclair in June 2003. Gordon was a beloved faculty member at Sinclair, where he met his dear friend and fellow Yellow Springs resident, Barry Heermann. Although almost 20 years Barry’s senior, Gordon said Barry was the brother he never had.
Gordon valued education, protecting nature, and caring for community, and encouraged his daughters in these, and other, endeavors. Both Leslie and Jenny followed in his footsteps, each in their own way — Leslie studying wild seals and protecting nature, and Jenny running the Little Art Theatre for 42 years, a place so often acknowledged as a local treasure enriching the community. Gordon was always proud of both of his daughters’ accomplishments throughout their lives, and loved hearing from people how much they appreciated his girls’ efforts.
In addition to his educational and career pursuits, Gordon was active in Yellow Springs community affairs from his Antioch graduation, well into his 80s. He was a member of the Yellow Springs Junior Chamber of Commerce, a fundraiser for the community swimming pool, and helped organize the Yellow Springs Little League, co-managing a team with Kenneth Adams for three years. Gordon also helped organize and then served on the board of the Yellow Springs Arts Council, and served as vice-chair of the Yellow Springs Community Council. He was one of the founders of the Tecumseh Land Trust and a member of its board. For a time, he served as board president of the Riding Centre, where Jenny worked and kept her horse. He particularly loved helping during the work-bees there. He also served on the boards for the Yellow Springs Unitarian Fellowship, Glen Helen Association and YS Home, Inc.
Gordon was a staunch supporter of civil rights, and active in the 1950s desegregation movement in Yellow Springs to equalize the rights of African Americans. He was also dedicated to preserving nature sanctuaries such as Glen Helen Nature Preserve and farmland in and around town.
On the personal side, Gordon loved to go sailing with a group of local friends, including longtime Yellow Springs residents John Powers, Andy Peters, Paul Cooper, Joe Maloney, George Dewey and Al and Mary Radin. During the autumn of 1975, Gordon and his wife, Ruth, went on a European sailing trip with the Radins. Gordon also sailed with his comrades on Chesapeake Bay, as well as Lake Michigan during our annual family summer vacations at The Mooring, in Holland, Michigan.
Gordon valued lifelong friendships. He was part of a small group of high school buddies who remained in touch throughout their lives. They called themselves the “Silver Six,” because while in high school they got silver friendship rings, which they continued to wear at their reunions through the years. Gordon was the last surviving member of this group, and greatly missed his earlier-departed friends. He kept his friendship ring all his life.
Expanding on his lifelong love of reading, literature and writing, Gordon served as a lay reader for freshman English classes at Yellow Springs High School, helping students improve their writing skills. Continuing his lifetime love of music, he joined the Yellow Springs Chorus, directed by Ruth Bent, and sang at town concerts.
One of Gordon’s unending passions was jazz music. This began in the early ’40s while he was in high school and fell in love with the big band sounds of the era. Over his lifetime, he accumulated an impressively large collection of 78, 45, LP, cassette tape, and CD jazz music, covering the swing bands of the ’40s ’50s early ’60s. Most of his later collection represented a broad spectrum of Dixieland and modern jazz.
While at Antioch, Gordon, who learned to play drums in his youth in Detroit, joined with four other Antiochians and formed a swing quintet, playing at Antioch’s Night Club events and frequently in the upstairs back room at Ye Olde Trail Tavern in Yellow Springs. Gordon also played with a local modern, bebop-influenced jazz group with locals Bill Hamilton and Shelly Blackman and Springfielder Jody Parsley. They performed locally at Com’s restaurant and bar and other venues in the area. For Gordon’s 75th birthday, his daughter Jenny organized a surprise party for him and reunited Gordon with his former bebop bandmates. One of the early members of the local Rambler Classics dixieland jazz band, Gordon was the drummer for much of the lifetime of the band, playing at Yellow Springs’ street fairs, jazz concerts in Dayton and Columbus, a variety of private affairs and for several years at The Winds Cafe in Yellow Springs.
Gordon was a loving and devoted father who adored his two daughters. He taught us to be kind and generous of spirit, and to look for the best attributes in people. He did everything he could for us throughout our lives. He always made time for each of us, even though he was busy with family life, career, friends and societal outreach.
He played games with us indoors and outdoors in all seasons. During wintertime, we went sledding at Gaunt Park, and ice skating on DeWine’s Pond and the Little Miami River by the Grinnell Mill Dam. Summertime activities included backyard badminton and wiffle ball with neighboring kids, tumbling gymnastics with us and our friends and building us an A-frame playhouse, complete with a ladder to its upper deck.
On evenings when we were playing outside somewhere in the neighborhood, he would call us home for dinner by blasting a loud, sustained note on a three-foot-long green-plastic heralding trumpet. Everyone in the neighborhood knew this distinctive sound, and sent us on our way scurrying home. On the quieter side, our father borrowed library books for us to read, brought home fragments of well-worn art supplies for our creative endeavors and read us stories before bed and when we were ill. He was always available to listen to our concerns and share our joys.
He nourished our deep love for animals — cats and dogs, rabbits and guinea pigs, hamsters and hooded rats, ducks, painted turtles and horses. He built a rabbit cage for Leslie’s first bunnies, Pepper and Tar, and constructed a backyard duck pen with a paddling pool for Jenny’s ducklings Daffy and Hannibal. One Christmas Day, Gordon and Ruth surprised Jenny with her best Christmas present ever — arranging regular horseback riding privileges throughout the winter with her favorite Riding Centre school horse, Apache. Gordon also loved our family cat, Shakespeare, who followed us around our home and yard and pushed his way in to snuggle next to our father in his favorite chair, and all of Jenny’s dogs.
When Gordon wanted to steer his daughters’ behaviors in a certain direction, he nudged them in loving and often humorous ways. One time, when Jenny’s room had been a mess for too long despite repeated requests for her to clean it up, she came home to find an official-looking notice on her bedroom door. Supposedly written by the Greene County Health Department, it stated that they had received numerous complaints about noxious fumes coming from her bedroom, and unless remedied immediately, they would have to evict her. She laughed at her dad’s great sense of humor and cleaned her room.
A loyal friend to all, Gordon was always willing to assist someone, and never refused requests for help. When his dear and longtime Yellow Springs friend John Powers died suddenly, Gordon stepped in to help his widow, Edy, also his longtime friend, with everything she needed. He mowed Edy’s grass and did fix-it jobs, and checked in on her for the rest of her life. When Edy became terminally ill, he visited her regularly at Friends Care. Some years later, when Gordon’s paramour of 10 years, Beverly Viemeister, fell ill, he stayed by her side at her home until her death. Afterwards, he helped Bev’s children with various tasks in and around her house and yard until the property sold.
Many people loved Gordon, and told his daughters so. He was a valued member and trusted friend on the local committees in which he served as a founding member, including Tecumseh Land Trust and Home, Inc. He was beloved at Sinclair Community College by their faculty, staff and students, and some kept in touch with him until the end of his life.
Gordon Cowperthwaite spent the last two and one-half years of his life at Friends Care Community, and died quietly on Nov. 11, 2024. He was 100 years old. His daughters extend heartfelt thanks to the staff at Friends Care and Hospice for all their steadfast care.
Leslie and Jenny are forever grateful for being blessed with such a wonderful and loving father, and deeply mourn his loss. Rest in peace, Beloved Father. We cherish your memory and the legacy you instilled within us, which sustain and guide our lives. You have our Eternal Love.
At Gordon’s request, there will be a small private gathering to honor his memory, rather than a public memorial service. His public tribute is this memoriam, and the memory of him embedded in the hearts of his family, friends and community.
In lieu of memorial flowers, Gordon wanted to be remembered by donations in his name to one or more of the following organizations. These organizations ask donors to specify “In memory of Gordon Cowperthwaite” along with their kind gift:
• Tecumseh Land Trust, PO Box 417, Yellow Springs, OH 45387;
• Glen Helen Association, 405 Corry St., Yellow Springs OH 45387;
• Friends Care Community, 150 E. Herman St., Yellow Springs OH 45387;
• Hospice of Dayton, 324 Wilmington Ave., Dayton OH 45420.
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