Daniel I. Cooper, 80, Was Author, Nuclear Physicist

Daniel I. Cooper, a 38-year summer resident of Menemsha whose late wife owned the Cooper Gallery at the corner of North Road and Dutcher Dock Road, died Thursday, August 3, at Mt. Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, following a heart attack last month. He was 80.

Mr. Cooper, an author, publisher and physicist trained at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), first began to visit the Vineyard in the early 1960s, renting an apartment above the office of the late Dr. Nevin in Edgartown and at other locations on the Island before purchasing his Menemsha home in 1977. From 1977 through 1987, the home's front portion housed the Cooper Gallery, which displayed the works of Mr. Cooper's late wife, Bette, an acclaimed watercolorist, as well as the works of other Island artists such as the late Time-Life Photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt and West Tisbury's Albert Alcalay. Bette Cooper died in 1995 at the age of 66.

Mr. Cooper loved the Vineyard and returned every summer. He kept a Javelin sailboat on Quitsa Pond and loved the sailboat races in Menemsha Pond.

Daniel Cooper was born in the Bronx, N.Y., the son of Israel and Elizabeth Cooper, passionate Zionists who immigrated from what was then Russia and is now Belarus at the turn of the century.

A witness to the dawn of the atomic age, Mr. Cooper first came to Cambridge in 1943 as a college student and earned a bachelor's degree from MIT in 1946. After a stint in the U.S. Navy serving as an assistant to Adm. Chester Nimitz, the commander of the Pacific forces, he returned to Cambridge and got a doctorate in nuclear physics in 1952.

He authored the book Enrico Fermi and the Revolutions of Modern Physics, published by the Oxford University Press in 1999.

He lived most of his adult life in New Jersey where, among other things, he worked at the famed Bell Laboratories on the first transatlantic telephone cables. Drawn to science writing, he left applied research to become managing editor of Nucleonics, and later executive editor and then publisher of International Science & Technology.

For nearly a decade, he worked for the McGraw-Hill company before starting Cooper Communications in 1973. After his wife, Bette, died in 1995 he considered moving back to Cambridge where he always felt most at home.

In 2000 he finally did so, and through a shared hairdresser was introduced to Doris Tanner, a Medford resident and social worker, whom he married in 2004. She survives him as do his three children, Matthew Cooper of Washington, D.C., Jonathan Cooper of Gorham, Me., and Ellen Epworth of South Woodstock, Vt. He is also survived by four grandchildren, Amos, Seth, Hannah and Benjamin; two daughters in law, Leanne Daniels of Gorham, Me., and Mandy Grunwald of Washington, D.C., and Vineyard Haven; two sisters, Anita Smith of Livingston, N.J., and Terry Sadin of New Hyde Park, N.Y.; and three step-children, Erik, Martin and Nelson Moe. Martin Moe is married to Liesel Loy, the daughter of Frank and Dale Loy who maintain a home in Vineyard Haven.

A memorial service will be held Tuesday, August 8, at the MIT Chapel. He will be cremated and his remains will be interred at Abel's Hill cemetery on the Vineyard, next to his late wife, later this summer. Dr. Cooper's children and grandchildren continue to visit the Vineyard and enjoy the house he bought in Menemsha.