Billy Cooper, 43, kept the “y.”
“In my office (White Plains law firm Marvin H. Cooper P.C.) we know when someone doesn”™t know me when they call and ask for Bill Cooper.”
There”™s an obligation to being a grown-up Billy, an expectation that some positive aspect of boyhood would have followed through to adulthood: the schoolyard tenacity of Billy Martin or the cross-my-heart earnestness of Billy Graham or, better yet, a combination of the two.
Billy Cooper does not disappoint. Quietly, but with all the gumption a single Billy ever mustered, he”™s calling out the suffocating bully named Failure and expelling it from the lives of hundreds of youths from the Elmsford, Port Chester and Bridgeport schools, plus from a school each on Long Island and in the Bronx and from a Manhattan community center.
It all came to pass because growing up Cooper had a friend named George Stein. They”™re still friends, though Cooper now lives in West Harrison and Stein in Colorado.
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What they have done and what they continue to do in the name of Morry Stein, George”™s father who died in a plane crash in 1994, is a story of hope with teeth. As you might suspect with a Billy involved, there”™s plenty of dirt beneath the fingernails and adventure to be had.
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Morry Stein was drafted in professional baseball and football, Cooper said, adding, “Morry was someone that everybody who knew him considered him to be their best friend. He believed in you and your strengths tremendously. I equate him with my dad and there are not a lot of people I equate with my dad, and for all the best reasons.”
Morry and Amy Stein ”“ George’s parents ”“ ran Camp Echo Lake near Lake George. At season”™s end they opened the camp to disadvantaged youths, a tradition that became Project Morry when Morry died and that Amy continues to supervise from her Hartsdale home.
The nonprofit Project Morry is as much a guarantee of success as is offered in this life. At-risk students put aside bad behaviors in favor of summer camping and mentored school work. Failure is not an option; the high school graduation rate for the stream of 400 participants is 100 percent.
Morry”™s Camp is located on the site of Camp Mogisca, near Port Jervis, about 90 minutes from the Tappan Zee Bridge.
Cooper”™s father, too, figures in the story. In one of those wonderful tales suburbia spawns with underreported frequency, the Cooper and Stein families bonded through the boys”™ friendship and shared 25 consecutive Thanksgiving dinners together.
Each of the boys would grow up to follow his father: Cooper into the law and Stein into camping.
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“Camping?” Cooper says with a practiced incredulity; he”™s told this one before. “Nobody made a living off camping. When you”™d meet a kid you”™d ask what their parents did. And George would say, ‘They run a camp.”™ Yeah ”“ but what do they do the other nine months of the year? We did not think of it as a year-round business, which it is.”
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Cooper had himself worked all his summers at Echo Lake and considered running a camp after working a year in corporate law discovering “everything I did not want to do in life.”
Billy Cooper”™s father and best friend Marvin Cooper, who died in February 2005, asked him to hold off on the camp idea and first have a go at litigating as a father-son team. “I already had the education,” he said. “We determined when we began that at the end of one year if we were not happy with the results we would end it. We were best friend and we did not want to jeopardize that. I smile when I talk about him.”
The arrangement flourished and the firm now features Cooper, attorney Anieska Garcia and paralegal Catina Lorenzo. It”™s sized the way Cooper likes it: “When someone comes in, they meet the person who is going to follow through with his or her case to the very end.”
Cooper is married to Hilary Cooper. They have three children: Maddy, 11; Annie, 8; and Teddy, 3.
The two pertinent web sites are: projectmorry.org and cooper-law.com.