Audrey Cooper worked for Newton public schools for decades, chaired the Newton Free Library Board of Trustees, co-chaired a committee to get a senior center built and—as if all that wasn’t enough—won the Newton Human Rights Award from the city and an Unsung Heroine Award from the state.
In short, Audrey Cooper spent her 97 years on Earth helping others and living actively. And soon, a monument to her impact on the city will stand at 345 Walnut St. in Newtonville: the Cooper Center for Active Living.
“Some of us were blessed to know her in person, but all of us, for decades and decades and decades to come, will know about Audrey,” Mayor Ruthanne Fuller said Thursday morning at the groundbreaking ceremony for the project. “She’s what all of us want to be, and she’s the values of Newton.”
Thursday’s cold rain didn’t keep the crowds away from the event, which paid tribute to the many people who got the new senior center from idea to concrete. Cooper’s family was there to help honor her life and celebrate the new senior center bearing her name.
“She was amazing,” Fuller continued. “She was warm, she was beautiful inside and out. She loved this city.”
Fuller campaigned for mayor in 2017 on a promise to get a new senior center built. In 2018, State Sen. Cynthia Creem got $100,000 in state funds earmarked for a feasibility study for a new senior center, and local advocates helped push the project along, even through the chaos of a pandemic.
“It’s been a long, rocky road to get here, but we’re here,” Joan Belle Isle of the Newton Council on Aging said.
Pieces of time
The site of the Cooper Center is where the city’s former Senior Center was, and before that the Newtonville Library was there.
As part of Thursday’s groundbreaking ceremony, Public Buildings Commissioner Josh Morse presented contents of a time capsule that was buried under the cornerstone of that library in 1938.
The time capsule contained lots of paperwork from the library, including pamphlets on literacy and which new books the library offered. There were also rare coins and a newspaper announcing that Nazi Germany had invaded Czechoslovakia.
