Lloyd Cooney: A Free Spirit Beneath A Stuffed Shirt

It has been 12 years since Lloyd E. Cooney's visage burst on our television screens like an unseasoned platter of elbow macaroni.

He was colorless to the point of pomposity, the quintessential stuffed shirt: bland, preachy and too self-righteous for comfort.

That was his TV persona and Cooney can laugh about it today.

The other day at lunch I mentioned his stuffed-shirtism and he agreed.

"People are always surprised, that there was quite another person away from that," he said, drawing the square with his fingers to simulate a TV set.

But TV screen was about all we knew of him. His conservative editorializing grated on a lot of nerves. He was, we knew, a convert to Mormonism and his public declarations - stuffy at best - would do nothing to upset an elder in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

"Quite another person" - indeed!

Behind this demulcent demeanor - no coffee, no smokes, no booze, white hair, conventional dress, utterly middle-class - beats the heart of a man who rolls the dice against fate itself.

Lloyd Cooney is, even now at age 69, a man who will go right up to the jaws of what Tom Wolfe calls the Great Gulp. He puts his hide on the line. He has the right stuff.

Cooney tells a very funny story about himself. One time, back in the '70s, he went wing-walking on a Stearman biplane. He did it upside down, he did a full loop, and endured G-forces that almost

popped his eyeballs out of their sockets.

That night, at home, his wife, Betty Cooney, turned to Channel 7 to catch the evening news. Her husband was president of that station. On the closing segment, anchorman Kim Mariner said, "Now, let's see what the boss was doing today."

Lloyd himself was quite pleased with the footage. But when Betty saw her husband wing-walking over Paine Field, she turned to him and exploded, "That's really stupid!!!"

The wing-walker tried to explain: not dangerous, really, kind of fun, etc. and etc. Betty was unconvinced. "I mean stupid, just plain stupid!," she said.

Over nearly half a century of marriage, Betty has become used to this strange, two-dimensional man she lives with.

There is Lloyd, the successful business man, pillar of Yarrow Point, of which he is mayor. Lloyd the devoted husband, father and grandfather - 14 grandchildren, No. 15 due shortly.

Now the other Lloyd. This is a guy who has, so help me, walked away from three nose-in crashes in his ultra-lite aircraft. This is a man who took up scuba diving during advanced years and petted a man-chewing eel with a head as big as a basketball and the disposition of a barracuda.

Betty has gotten used to those things.

So she is not surprised when Lloyd takes off for the American Southwest, Mexico or Canada on his 1300 c.c. Harley Custom Soft Tail.

He's a devoted biker, member of a group of Northwest businessmen (Martin Selig, Ron Dunlap, Herb Bridge, Kemper Freeman, et al.) who call themselves "Hell's Rotarians" and "The Mild Ones."

On TV, as square as the screen itself. But we should have known. Lloyd Cooney made his first paratrooper drop with the 82nd Airborne in the Battle of Bastogne. He made some glider landings, too.

When he got back from World War II, Cooney joined an air circus stunt show in Salt Lake City. He wing-walked then, too, and parachuted and did what they called "steeple-chasing" in a Jeep.

Here in Seattle he parachuted out at the Issaquah field and very nearly pulverized himself when he jumped out of an Army helicopter and got his chute tangled up in his legs.

That wasn't enough, was it? No, he had to bungee jump. So last year at the age of 68, Lloyd did a couple of bungee jumps off a bridge in Nanaimo, B.C.

One of his pleasures as true-blue husband, father, grandfather and self-styled civic icon is to watch himself wing-walking on video tape. "It gives me some of the same feeling I had when I did it."

For almost two hours, I sat across from Lloyd Cooney, the Mr. Squaresville of KIRO, and when we got through talking there wasn't a glimmer of that straight-arrow talking head in the box.

"Seems nutty, doesn't it?" he said. "I guess I have a lust for excitement. But it's not insane, really, it's a desire to overcome fear. The challenge is to overcome being afraid.

"Doing those things, you are always fearful," he said. "If you`re not, you're nuts."

Emmett Watson's column appears Sunday and Thursday in the Northwest section of The Times.