I have previously briefly mentioned the doyenne of newspaper-sellers on Capitol Hill, Annie Cooper. A fixture of first the Carroll Arms Hotel for over 30 years and then –– after the Arms’ closure–– at a shack on the corner of First and D Streets NE, Annie was well-known to all with business on the Hill. However, in all the encomiums written of her, little was said of her early life.
Annie (as she was listed on the earliest paperwork filed for her) Abraham was born ca. 1903 in Syria, then a part of the Ottoman Empire. Her father’s name was Solomon, her mother’s name Mary. A few years after Annie’s birth, her father emigrated to the United States. In 1910, when he was working as a janitor and living in a YMCA just southwest of Pittsburgh, he sent for his wife and two daughters.
Over the next ten years, three more children were born, and the 1920 census found them in Warren Township, Ohio, 80 miles Northwest of their original home.
In 1926, Annie (who can be seen above) married Russel H. Cooper. In the 1930 census, she claims to have been 19 years old at the time, which is unlikely, as this would put her birth several years after her father’s arrival in the United States. However, her husband is listed as being the same age, so the obvious inference is that she did not want to admit to being older than he.
The exact details remain as elusive as everything having to do with Annie Cooper (as she went from then on) was, until she reappeared in Washington D.C. in 1948. While she came to study hotel management, she instead soon took over management of a canteen at Sibley hospital before taking over the newsstand in the Carroll Arms Hotel around 1950. A few years later, when that hotel was closed down, she was given the use of a trailer on a corner nearby – and continued to use it thereafter, apparently rent-free.
Or, at least, that’s what was reported many years later; Contemporary data is entirely lacking. However, starting in 1978, that began to change. An article in the Washington Post started it all. At the time, she was recovering from a broken hip, and received a Post reporter in her apartment. While she was unable to make it to her trailer, friends that she had made over the previous 28 years – including a Capitol Hill Police officer – manned the store.
The broken hip was far from her only problem over the next few years, as her penchant for giving credit where it was probably not due came back to haunt her to the tune of several thousand dollars. Once again, her friends rallied to her cause held a fundraiser in a Senate committee room, raising some $6,500 to get her back onto her (financial) feet again.
It was not a lack of work ethic that hampered her. She was known to be there from early in the morning ––when incoming Hill staffers would pick up their morning Posts–– to late ––when the same staffers on their way home would pick up their Evening Stars.
Her one foible seems to have been related to her age – the early articles about her consistently give her age as 20 years younger than it actually was. Only her obituary, published in the Washington Post on April 25, 1983, indicated her correct age: 78 years old.
The obituary, as well as a previous Post article on her was republished in the Congressional Record, having been read in by Senator Ted Kennedy, who added that his brother John (whom Cooper had dinged for having “never bought, just looked,” at her magazines) had told him when he arrived on the Hill that the most important Senate rules was “to get your newspapers from Ann’s (sic) Newsstand.”
Annie Cooper was buried in the Parklawn Memorial Park in Rockville, Maryland.