Katherine Sixt Cooper | Retired teacher, 98

Katherine Sixt Cooper, 98, a longtime Main Line resident and retired French teacher, died of pneumonia May 3 at her daughter's home in Wynnewood.

A native of Cleveland, Ohio, Mrs. Cooper earned a bachelor's degree from Bryn Mawr College and spent her sophomore year studying at the Sorbonne in Paris.

After graduating, Mrs. Cooper taught music and French at the former Huntington School in Wayne. She rented a room nearby, her daughter Martha Eischen said, and met the neighbor across the street, Frederick Cooper. They married in 1933.

While raising their six children in Narberth, Mrs. Cooper taught French part-time in several private schools and was a substitute teacher in the Lower Merion School District. When her family was grown, she earned a master's degree in education at Villanova University and for 10 years taught at Haverford High School in Havertown. She was head of the foreign language department at Haverford when she retired in 1975.

Throughout her life she took care of needy people, her daughter said, and led United Fund, Heart Association, and Easter Seal drives in her neighborhood. She sent out 30 to 50 cards every month to friends and family for birthdays and other events. For more than 60 years she was a surrogate mother to a French woman whose parents had been killed by the Nazis.

Mrs. Cooper directed the Sunday School, edited the newsletter, and played the organ for many years at St. James the Less Episcopal Church in Philadelphia.

In addition to her daughter, she is survived by sons Paul, David, Stephen, and Andrew; another daughter Mary Malishewski; 14 grandchildren; and 33 great-grandchildren. Her husband died in 1996.

A Mass of Requiem will be said at 10:30 a.m. today at the Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd, Lancaster Avenue and Montrose Street, Rosemont.