Half a century after he was elected to the only political office he ever held and after 50 years of trying to win office again, Joe Cooper died without much notice during one of the peaks of the COVID pandemic.

Cooper’s widow, Elizabeth, said late last week that Cooper, 76, died in January, the same month he tested positive for COVID. Cooper had other health issues, including suffering a stroke in 2017.

The late word of his death is the end of a local political fable that even Cooper would have been hard pressed to make up.

Cooper was elected to the Shelby County Quarterly Court, the predecessor of the County Commission, in 1972.

He was known as the “marrying squire” because he often performed wedding ceremonies using one of the more obscure powers of members of the court.

He sometimes performed the civil ceremonies in between other business in the commission office. Sometimes he would even answer the desk phone during ceremonies and tell the caller to hold on.

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Cooper, whose father had been in the restaurant business and made his mark with box lunches that were a Memphis culinary tradition, got the press buildup most white and young politicos got in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

There were plenty of pictures with the family, posed photos with other office holders, lots of loud neck ties with big knots.

Cooper was among those caught in a wave of federal corruption cases in the late 1970s that rocked county government just as the then-new office of county mayor was created and the quarterly court became the County Commission.

Cooper resigned and was convicted in 1977 of loan fraud — never to hold elected office again — although he tried continually after emerging from a brief prison sentence at the federal prison at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama.

He returned to prison 30 years later on another federal conviction.

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Cooper often boasted that, for a time, his cellmate at Maxwell had been former U.S. Attorney John Mitchell.

In his own slow-walking and slow-talking way, Cooper was relentless. Dodge his phone calls and Cooper would start leaving messages that began, “This is poor, old Joe Cooper.”

If yard signs had been the mark of political success, Cooper would have been E.H. Crump’s equal. Except he had a penchant for occasionally putting his larger signs in yards on major thoroughfares without the owners’ permission – and in some cases when the owner was on vacation.

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Cooper bragged about the number of yard signs placed and had the statistics to prove it the way other politicians tout ward and precinct numbers.

He expressed pride in a deal in which he got his name to run in the digital messages on gas pumps.

His slogan “It’s Time — Now” was printed in red letters on yard signs and stickers that usually didn’t include what office he was running for so he could use them in other campaigns that would follow.

Cooper knew that at a certain level he would always be a political pariah. His hope had been that it would fade to some degree.

Year after year, with backing from developers including Rusty Hyneman and William B. Tanner, Cooper ran doggedly for office when he wasn’t working directly for them.

The more he ran, the more he became the person most surprised at the outcome.

One forlorn election night found Cooper alone among a crowd of tourists at an outdoor bar on Beale Street just an hour or two after the polls had closed.

As a soft rain began to fall, Cooper declared he was finished with running for office and turned away to face the bartender.

Cooper had tried to become part of the entertainment district’s community. But he never made it past the fringes.

His plans to open a club in the old Lansky’s building that today is the Hard Rock Café was and still is on the other side of Second Street from what is officially the Beale Street district.

With Cooper as the front man for a venture that would be built around naming rights and the image of Sun rock and roll legend Jerry Lee Lewis, the boundary became a bright red line.

Cooper had just announced the new venture and partnership with Lewis, including plans for live performances by Lewis, when Lewis decided to take an indefinite refuge in Ireland from tax troubles.

What was to be called “Jerry Lee Lewis’s Spot” didn’t have Jerry Lee Lewis.

From there, Cooper went to a plan for another nightspot on the other border of the entertainment district — the other side of Fourth Streets, now Ida B. Wells Street.

What was then Club Plush was Cooper’s next goal of bringing a strip club to Beale Street with backing from the strip club industry.

But the move called for a subtlety that neither Cooper nor the industry possessed. An attempt to turn the space that is now Coyote Ugly into a strip club had failed when the would-be owners literally painted their intentions on the side of the building late one night.

It got no further.

Club Plush, a converted movie theater, was just across the street from First Baptist Church on Beale, the longest standing Black Baptist church in the city.

Cooper initially denied it was to be a strip club despite have the new name of the club — “Knockers” — posted on a small sign outside the building that included a line drawing of a woman’s torso.

Plush became Club Crave instead of becoming a strip club and was closed as a nuisance by court order before it was torn down with plans for a hotel on the site still pending.

Cooper returned to politics and won the Democratic primary for a Shelby County Commission seat by one vote, prompting the ironic nickname of “Landslide Joe Cooper.”

He also pledged to sell off parts of Shelby Farms Park to developers. He made the park’s herd of bison the symbol of what he saw as the need to develop the park land as the popularity of the park was beginning to blossom.

Cooper lost the general election to Bruce Thompson, the Republican nominee.

Tanner had ceased supporting Cooper’s political ventures by then and after Tanner’s death, Cooper’s money woes began to mount.

Car sales seemed to be the new direction for Cooper until federal prosecutors made the case against a large drug organization that included Korreco Green. Green offered prosecutors the man who leased him several vehicles as a way to launder drug money. It was Cooper.

Cooper had hooked Green in one of his complicated car lease schemes. It also included Cooper helping Green make bail on a murder charge. The luxury car was leased in someone else’s name with Green paying the note. But Green fell behind on the note.

“I was having to eat it and I couldn’t find him,” was the way Cooper put it when it came time to testify in Memphis federal court.

A federal drug task force found Green before Cooper did. The task force seized the car after Cooper reported it stolen. Cooper filed a claim seeking both the car and the cash found in it.

He set up a meeting in 2006 with Green on a parking lot in East Memphis. A dozen FBI and DEA agents showed up instead and took him to a nearby motel room.

That’s where Cooper agreed to wear a wire as part of a federal corruption sting that focused on Memphis City Council members Rickey Peete and Edmund Ford Sr.

“The bottom line is they know I know just about everybody in local government,” Cooper would testify later.

Cooper had already been lobbying for a controversial billboard project. But coming on the heels of the Tennessee Waltz corruption sting a year earlier involving some of the same agents that had targeted several state legislators from Shelby County, Peete was suspicious and began hearing rumors he ignored that proved to be correct.

Peete had made it back to the council after being convicted on bribery charges in the late 1980s and serving a federal prison sentence.

Cooper recorded his meeting with Peete on Beale Street in which Cooper left $5,000 in cash on top of a toilet in the Beale Street Merchant’s Association office.

Transcripts of Cooper’s conversations with Peete showed it was a fairly straightforward conversation and transaction.

The recordings of Cooper’s conversations with Ford were a very different matter. They were played in court as Ford fought the corruption charges and was acquitted of all six extortion and bribery charges.

As Cooper would count out cash for Ford, Ford was always talking about something other than the money. He scarcely seemed aware of exactly how much it was. Ford’s defense was that it was a business loan.

In the same conversations, Cooper was also trying to work another deal to get Ford to lease a car from him.

Several jurors said after the verdict that Cooper’s demeanor on the witness stand and his rapid-fire recorded conversations with Ford, bringing up several business deals at once, were a factor in the acquittal.

“I’m here to do the right thing,” Cooper told Ford’s attorney Michael Scholl on cross examination.

“You’re here to get yourself out of a jam, aren’t you?” Scholl replied.

“I’m here to eliminate a cancer that was on the City Council,” Cooper responded.

“You probably became the cancer,” Scholl said.

“It takes two to tango,” Cooper countered.

“And you like to dance, don’t you, Mr. Cooper?” Scholl answered.

By the time Cooper began serving his prison sentence for money laundering, he was working as a courier delivering prescriptions and still dabbling in real estate tips he heard about.

His last bid for public office was a run for City Council in the 2015 Memphis elections. But Cooper hadn’t restored his citizenship rights, including the right to vote and to run for office.

He took the Shelby County Election Commission to court, claiming election officials had told him erroneously that his rights would not be restored.

In August 2015, Chancellor Jim Kyle delayed finalizing the city ballot for the elections that October until he heard evidence and ruled on Cooper’s claim.

Cooper’s rights were restored five days after the ballot was certified by the Election Commission without Cooper’s name.

Kyle ruled that Cooper was too late to be on the ballot even though Kyle also faulted Election Commission officials for misleading Cooper.

But Cooper hadn’t started the process of having his rights restored in Circuit Court until a month later and the petition he submitted after the deadline was short of the required 25 signatures.

“The moral is get 50 signatures anytime you run for office,” Cooper said as he ruled out pursuing the matter further. “It just didn’t fall my way. That’s life.”

Two years later, Cooper had the stroke that began the decline of his health.

He was buried in the county cemetery among a group of unmarked graves.

Parts of this story were taken from stories in The Daily News and The Memphis News.