Man completes 69-year goal that began with deadly fire

On Jan. 27, 1946, 14-year-old Frank Cooper had given up.

He was working on building a short-wave receiver radio that he saw in Popular Mechanics but had gotten too tired to continue working that night.

Not long after falling asleep, he had a dream.

"During my sleep I had this terrible dream that the ceiling was on fire," he said. "There was this little hole in the ceiling and as I watched the hole got bigger, the fire spread."

Cooper soon realized it wasn't a dream — his room was on fire. He woke his sister and stepfather and tried to run down to the lobby of the Grand Hotel in Monroe, where they were living, but it was engulfed in flames. His family escaped out a hallway to a veranda off the back of the hotel that overlooked the Ouachita River.

"As we got to that veranda, I could hear thumps and realized that people were jumping out of the windows and jumping into the river," he said. "The river was farther down. They weren't making it. As I recall, it burnt up pretty quickly."

The next day, Cooper returned to the hotel to figure out what happened. A man by the name of Harry Coppenburger had found his wife in bed with another man. Cooper was told Coppenburger killed his wife and the man and burned their bodies, catching the hotel on fire.

"There went my radio and all of my possessions," he said. "I never got to build that radio. Years later, I became a ham radio operator and thought about that radio a long time.

"Finally I decided I would find that article. I went through Popular Mechanics magazines trying to find all the issues in 1945 and 1946. Here recently, I went to Google and was able to look at all the issues from 1944-1946 and determined that the February 1946 issue was the short-wave receiver."

Sixty-nine years later, Cooper, now 83, is finally putting the pieces together.

"I've acquired most of the parts to build the receiver," he said. "It feels like a completion. Something that I wanted to do all these years. It's feeling really good to do it and like I'm completing a project I started so many years ago. It's like things haven't been completed until I do that."

Cooper, who now lives in Friendswood, Texas, hopes to finish the radio soon.

"It will probably be several weeks before I finish building it," he said. "I'm amazed that I thought that I could build this receiver when I was a kid. It's not an easy project."

Finding the parts has proved difficult.

"Thank goodness for eBay," he said. "I thought the parts were very expensive then, but they're very expensive now. It's going to be worth every penny. It's like a therapy. It's a very satisfying project."

Cooper said he finally feels like he's making touch with his past.

"I always feel there's a child within me," he said. "But now, there's a connection with that child, and that feels very good. It makes me feel completed."

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