Tom S. Cooperrider

Dr. Tom S. Cooperrider, 94, passed away peacefully at Laurel Lake in Hudson, Ohio on July 14, 2021.

Tom was born April 15, 1927, in Newark, Ohio, the son of Oscar and Ruth (Smith) Cooperrider.  He attended various grade schools in Ohio’s Perry and Licking counties.  When he graduated from Utica High School in 1945, World War II was still being fought, and was inducted into the U.S. Army a few weeks later.  He served in Germany in the Third Infantry Division and was honorably discharged in November 1946.

He enrolled at Denison University in Granville, Ohio, and graduated in 1950 with a major in English.  He spent the following summer in Washington, DC, in a Students-In-Government program where he met President Truman at the White House.  When the program ended, he stayed in Washington for a year working in the agricultural section of the U.S. Census Bureau.

In summer of 1951 he worked in a Swedish work camp in the Black Forest of Germany, building houses for refugees.  That fall, he enrolled at the University of Iowa and took a semester of graduate work in English.  In 1952, while working evenings at the Iowa City VA Hospital, he began taking classes in botany. 

He completed his doctoral work in botany at Iowa in June 1958 and spent that summer as an NSF Researcher at Mountain Lake Biological Station studying the flora of Giles County, Virginia.  He published books on the flora of Iowa in 1959 and 1962.

In June 1953, Tom married fellow botany graduate student, Miwako “Mix” Kunimura, a union that lasted sixty-four years until she passed in January, 2018.

 In September 1958 he joined the biology faculty at Kent State University where he taught for the next 35 years and served as the Curator of the Kent State University Herbarium.  During the 1962-1963 school year, he took leave from Kent State to teach at the Manoa Campus of the University of Hawaii in Honolulu.    Among the several courses he taught his favorite was Local Flora.  Tom retired in 1993 and continued his research on the flora of Ohio, publishing books on the Ohio flora in 1995 and 2001.

Tom was a floristic field botanist.  He enjoyed collecting plant specimens from new places and new habitats.  His collections and those of his students provided many of the specimens used by his wife to build the Kent State University Herbarium.  His research publications were mostly on the flora of Ohio.

He and Christopher Rizzo designed and built the Herrick Magnolia Gardens on the KSU campus, named in honor of their colleague, J. Arthur Herrick.

Late in retirement he wrote three non-technical books. “Botanical Essays from Kent” (2010), is a collection of articles focusing on the nature and context of Kent Bog, a unique botanical site which he discovered in 1961.

“Soldier Days: At the End of the War” (2017), is a memoir of his 1945-1946 tour of duty compiled from excerpts of letters written to his family.

“Tamarack Needles” (2020), his final work, is a collection of his poetry.

He is survived by sister Sue Cooperrider, children Julie and John Cooperrider, grandson C. Matthew Burns (Heather), and great-grandson Hans Burns.

Memorial donations may be made to the Tom S. and Miwako K. Cooperrider Herbarium Endowment Fund, c/o the KSU Foundation, 350 Lincoln Street, Kent, OH 44242.  Memorial event to be announced later.

Services in care of Bissler & Sons Funeral Home and Crematory, 628 West Main Street, Kent, OH 44240.

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