Death has a way of putting things into perspective.
Though it may appear at times that the words on these pages fall from the sky, there is indeed a team of real people putting every bit of these pages together.
Though she didn’t write herself and many readers are unlikely to recognize her name, Minnie Jean Cooper was as much a part of the team that puts out this Opinion page as anyone else.
Minnie passed away suddenly on Wednesday at our office in Monrovia. Even as I write this on Wednesday night, I still can’t really believe she’s gone.
For the past five years, Minnie has been the person collecting, reading, editing and putting together the letters to the editor published by this news group in 11 newspapers across Southern California.
From the serious and thoughtful to the ridiculous and hostile, she was the person tasked with ensuring a fair representation of the readership appeared in the letters-to-the-editor section.
Whether letter writers interacted much with her or not, she came to know them and where they were coming from on issues. It was she who broke the news to me just months ago that prolific letter writer Mary Emily Smiley herself passed away. (“Smiley is smiling” Minnie wrote me after I wrote a column ending with a remembrance of her.)
And boy did she find her responsibilities as letters editor amusing. Whenever we spoke, we cracked ourselves up talking about some of the wildest letters we received, especially the unreasonably angry letters.
That’s what we did the day before her passing, when I got to speak with her at length as we settled on our plan for the final weeks of the year and caught up on things.
In a frequent theme of our conversations going back to when she first came to work for the Opinion section, we talked about the swift passage of time, how fast life is moving and how ridiculous it is that 2026 is just around the corner.
“Well you know what that means?” she joked, knowing I didn’t even want to think about the election year around the corner. But, having worked with her during election seasons in 2020, 2022 and 2024, I knew everything would work out just fine.
In another key role she played behind the scenes, she was a masterful organizer of our election season schedule. She would help me send out hundreds of candidate surveys the editorial board put together every election year, make sure the candidates responded and then coordinate the well over 100 candidate and ballot measure advocate interviews we conduct.
No easy task, but she pulled it off and made it look easy.
Along the way, she’d have to fend off campaign consultants, longshot candidates trying to lobby her, and people asking her if her name really is Minnie Cooper. And yes, of course, she drove a Mini Cooper with a custom license plate underscoring her commitment.
Though new to the Opinion page, she definitely wasn’t new to the papers. She’d spent decades in various roles on the marketing side of the business and so was new to the editorial side at the end of her career. Even so, she was always responsive to feedback, always willing to learn. In her final days she was figuring out how to work with AI and even moreso how to pick the perfect AI stock so she could call it a day.
She of course had her own opinions about politics, but was always good natured and had a good sense of humor about it all. She wanted to see better for her city of San Bernardino. She wanted to see better leaders. She wished Americans were less angry at each other over what they believed. And she wished more of you would write letters (she knew you were out there).
We’ll miss her.
I’ll miss our chats.
May she rest in peace.
Sal Rodriguez is the opinion editor for the Southern California News Group. He can be reached at salrodriguez@scng.com