Out in Greene County, Iowa

Sell-out, capacity crowd to help Cooper Prom go out with a bang on Saturday night, April 4

By CHUCK OFFENBURGER
April 3, 2009
COOPER, IOWA

In the first four years we have held the Cooper Prom, those attending have come to expect some pretty extravagant decorating. There was an Eiffel Tower in the center of the gym floor our first year, complete with twinkling lights on it. We had a castle another year, and an operating lighthouse tower another. In 2008, when we had a tropical theme, Reagan and Rich Osborne built volcano that was 18 feet wide at its base and 15 feet high, and it belched smoke, seemed to have red-glowing lava inside it and occasionally rumbled loud enough to shake the banquet glassware.

So we knew the crowd for this year’s prom, which the sponsoring Committee for a Super Cooper announced ahead of time is going to be the last, would expect something grand.

Saturday night, they’ll see what we came up with – and so will we on the committee, since it’s an idea under redevelopment in the final 48 hours before the prom.

A sell-out, capacity-stretching crowd of 280 will gather in the old Cooper Community Building for a 6:30 p.m. banquet meal, catered by the Jefferson-Scranton High School culinary arts instructor Donna Carhill and her students. Our servers will be the members of the East Greene High School Jazz Band. Then at 8 p.m., the 15-piece “High Society Big Band,” which is based in Huxley with players from all over central Iowa, will take over with their big sound for three hours of dancing.

Our theme this year is “Fly Me to the Moon,” after an old crooner of a song that Frank Sinatra made famous.

And we were thinking big this year. How big? Well, is the solar system big enough for you?

The Osbornes, who are very creative thinkers, came up with an idea to hang a half-dozen or more air-inflated weather balloons – some of them six to eight feet in diameter – from the rafters of the gym. They’d paint them first, then have our committee’s lighting expert Dan Hardaway set special lights on them. They all did just that, and on Monday and Tuesday nights of this week, the solar system was looking great.


Reagan Osborne applies the paint to one of the weather balloons that was turned into a “planet” in the Cooper solar system.

But on Wednesday night, about 45 minutes after the heat was turned on in the gymnasium, our planets started popping!

The Osbornes were crestfallen, but were still not without their sense of humor. What was their explanation of the collapse of our planets?

“Global warming!” said Reagan Osborne.

“When the air heated up in the gym, that’s when the planets started to pop. These were new weather balloons we’d bought, made of latex. We blew them up with air, then painted them. What we didn’t realize is that the latex paint we used would become like a shell around the balloon. So after we got them done, turned down the heat and went home, the balloons contracted just a little bit. The next evening when we came in, the balloons were fine at first. But it was cold in the gym, so we turned on the heat and those balloons started expanding as they warmed up. The paint shell around them wouldn’t allow them to get as big as they wanted to, and they finally just tore holes in the weak parts of the paint and popped.

“We were so bummed!” she concluded.

But the crew from the Super Cooper Committee rallied with other decorating ideas, and some very interesting lighting special effects by Dan Hardaway, and the old gym will look great on prom night.

The committee voted a month ago that it would continue its marketing and promotion of the Cooper Community Building through the prom, and then end its efforts to maintain and improve the 54-year-old building.

It was constructed as an addition to the old Franklin Consolidated School Building. After the school in Cooper consolidated with Jefferson in 1959, the facilities were used as a middle school and later for upper-elementary grades. As it deteriorated, it was closed in the later 1970s and the school building was demolished in 1981. The Jefferson school board turned the gymnasium addition over to the Franklin Township Board of Trustees, which has operated it as a community center. But the trustees are restricted by law from putting more than $2,200 in tax money into the building each year, and the actual cost of maintaining and operating it is about $4,500.

The Super Cooper Committee has conducted various fundraisers and rented the building to raise enough money to cover the additional costs, and make some improvements when possible. But in the last year, it had become an excessively difficult challenge for the committee of volunteers.

The future of the building will be resolved later by the trustees, but for now, it’s prom time in the town of only 30 people, and 10 times that many folks of all ages will come dressed in their finest Saturday night for one last blast in Cooper!


Sue Wind is shown here turning big balls of white wadding into “lunar rocks” by artistically spraying them with silver paint.


Cooper Prom coordinators Carla Offenburger and Karen Lawton are shown here having a quick conference on what to do next.


Here’s a look at the centerpieces for the banquet tables. Not the coiled flower “vase.” That’s actually a spring we found under old tumbling boards in a storage room at the Cooper gym. We collected the springs, knew we’d eventually use them for something, turned them into flower holders this year and touched them up with silver spray paint!


The highlight of each night’s work on the decorations these past two weeks has been “snack time,” and here Lynda Holtz shows off the “scotcheroo” she was eating.


Another of our key volunteers has been Dot Lawton, one of the matriarchs of the Cooper community.