Dear Editor:
This is an open letter to Frank Cooley’s family: Karen, Andrew and Michaela.
To know Frank was to love him. If you didn’t know him, it was possible to miss all the fun of his enthusiastic discussions of old New York, his father, oil shale and water law issues.
His devotion to Meeker’s water heritage and the future of oil shale recovery in the Piceance Basin will be a lasting legacy to our community.
But most of all he was a conscientious attorney and intelligent advisor with a loyalty to his clients and perfect integrity that is now gone.
The likes of him will not soon come again.
But there was someone who knew Frank long before he was born:
”They say that in his prime,
Ere the pruning-knife of Time
Cut him down,
Not a better man was found
By the Crier on his round
Through the town.”
From “The Last Leaf”
Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1809-1894.
So long, pal.
Jim Magid
Meeker