A firefighter for the U.S. Forest Service, in 1940 Cooley volunteered for a new program: “Smokejumper”. Cooley and one other man were the first to do it — to fly over a remote forest fire in an airplane and parachute down to fight the fire.
“Our training consisted of a man saying: ‘This is your parachute. You know what fire is. We jump tomorrow’,” Cooley remembered. He had never been in an airplane before. He did 10 practice jumps, and then he was dispatched to a real fire, at Marten Creek in the Nezperce National Forest. The entire “team” consisted of Cooley and Rufus Robinson; Robinson jumped first. Cooley landed in a tree, but climbed down and by morning they had the fire under control.
“I don’t know why, but I was never afraid to jump,” Cooley once said, even though in 1949, a team of 12 smokejumpers he sent in to a Montana fire were killed when the wind shifted, turning their escape route into an inferno. Cooley was exonerated of any wrongdoing, “but I still look at that map and have thought about it every day since then,” he said in 1994.
The only other thing he didn’t like about the job: having to walk out of the fire area when the job was done. Cooley helped found the National Smokejumper Association and served as its first president. He retired from the Forest Service in 1975, and died November 9 at age 98.