Clifford Warren Cooper

Clifford Warren Cooper, an inventor and paralegal, passed February 15, 2023 from a heart attack at a rehabilitation center in Adelphi, Maryland, a week after undergoing major back surgery. He was 68.

Clifford, known to many as Cliff, was born in Denver on May 15, 1954, the second child of Maxine (Mosby) and George H. Cooper Jr. He grew up in the northeast part of the city, then predominately black, attending Columbine Elementary, Cole Junior High and Morey Junior High before graduating from East High School.

He was gifted with mechanical and technical skills—he could fix just about anything. As a boy, he reveled in assembling model cars and planes. As a young man, he learned how to take apart and put back together a car engine. He could build a computer from its components. In his youth, he worked for IBM in Colorado and spent a summer working on the Alaska oil pipeline.

Cliff started college at the University of Colorado in Boulder, where he pledged Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity, before earning a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of California-Santa Cruz.

He developed a problem with his vision and invented a machine that trained his eyes to overcome it. He secured patents on his “personal binocular trainer,” but was unable to seal a deal to manufacture and market the device.

After moving to Washington, D.C., he worked as a paralegal specializing in administrative law. He went back to college, taking evening classes and earning a second bachelor’s degree, in paralegal studies, from the University of Maryland, College Park.

Cliff was employed for a time by Dewey Balantine, a major law firm, where he came to know Joseph A. Califano Jr., a senior partner who had been U.S. Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare under President Jimmy Carter. Cliff’s work involved collecting documents from federal agencies, for example, the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Showing his enterprising spirit, he established a sideline retrieving government documents and faxing them to law firms outside Washington. The emergence of the internet and a new government practice of posting such records online undercut his business.

In his day job, he spent years gathering documents concerning a long-running lawsuit against the federal government’s proposal to establish a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. In his first campaign for president, Barack

Obama promised to withdraw the government from the lawsuit and, once in office, he did. The Great Recession of 2008-2009 also led to shrinkage in law firms and curbed their billings for paralegal services, squeezing Clifford out of his job and career.

For decades, since suffering an injury in California, he had managed to function despite continual back pain. After being a paralegal, he worked as a substitute teacher in Prince Georges County, Maryland, a truck driver and a ride share driver.

Through his mother, Cliff was an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. He lived in Landover Hills, Maryland outside Washington.

He leaves his wife, Angel (Hinson) Cooper of Landover Hills, Md., stepson Ricardo Hinson of Hyattsville, Md.??, brother Kenneth of Boston, sisters Sheryl Traylor and Verniece Vafeades, nieces Latasha Cooper, Shaunay Vafeades and Mikhail Vafeades, great nieces Detajinae and Deejahney Kelly, Brazil Hoyle, and Lyric Swift, and great nephew Legend Swift, all of Denver. He was predeceased by his brother Ronald, great nephew Jayden Hoyle and his parents.