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Clifford D. Cooper, a former U.S. government official and an entrepreneur whose company manufactured rockets that launched the first U.S. satellites, died Oct. 8 at his Kailua home. He was 94.
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Chaminade University honored Cooper last year with the first Hogan Entrepreneurial Program Lifetime Achievement Award. He was also a member of Chaminade’s board of governors.
"When he spoke, people listened," said John Webster, head of the Chaminade entrepreneur program.
In 1985 Cooper and his wife, Louisa, who grew up in Hawaii, moved to Hawaii, where he spent his final years active in California real estate and other endeavors.
Cooper was born in Oklahoma and was reared in Texas.
As a teenager he worked at a neighbor’s livestock pens, taking his pay in runt piglets. He fed them restaurant slop and spilled grain he collected in his other job sweeping a grain elevator. The pigs grew and he sold them.
He later wrote a book titled "The Runt Pig Principle: A Fundamental Approach to Solving Problems and Creating Value." It is required reading for Chaminade entrepreneur students, Webster said. A Stanford engineering professor also required students to read it to give them a "needed dose of reality," said his wife, Louisa.
Cooper was president of the U.S. Junior Chamber of Commerce from 1949 to 1950. In 1953 he was appointed to the Hoover Commission task force on lending agencies.
Cooper also served as U.S. Small Business Administration director and adviser to the U.S. secretary of defense.
By the 1950s he began building rockets, with "little working capital, no rocket systems experience and only marginal engineering ability," he wrote.
Cooper Development Corp. produced various rockets, including the three upper stages of the first U.S. satellite, Explorer I, launched in 1958.
Cooper is survived by wife Louisa; sons Dennis, Richard and Courtney; daughter Cindy Reding; stepsons George and Jim Witter; stepdaughters Marti and Liz Witter; and 10 grandchildren.
Services are pending.
