From time to time, Good News will be carrying a feature about the remarkable people who warm the pews at St. Raymond Church every weekend. They are the folks whose steadfast faith and devotion give our parish its welcoming spirit and joyful feeling that we are more than a place of worship: we are a family. Here is the story of a woman who celebrated her 82nd birthday on December 16. She has helped us to sustain that family feeling for 52 years.

Ella Cooper was just a young mother when she tried to enroll her son in St. Raymond School back in the early ‘70’s. He’d been diagnosed as bi-polar, and she didn’t know what to do to be sure he got a good education. She was a Baptist at the time, and the new priest, Fr. George Moore, told her sorrowfully that parents of children at their school had to be Catholic. That didn’t stop Ella. She promptly enrolled in six weeks of instruction which prepared her for conversion to the faith. Soon young Ernest, Jr., joined the children at St. Raymond School.
So did Ella. She volunteered as a homeroom mother. Then she became an office volunteer.
“I was a nurse, a counselor, a baby-sitter, and the one who hugged the kids when they needed somebody to help them through a rough time,” she said. “Today, I’m still a grandmom to those kids.”
Mother of two children (Ernie, Jr. and Elissa), Ella eventually raised her grandson (Ernest III), from three months to 18 years old – all the while continuing her time at the school.
Things were much different, back in the ‘70’s. “Whatever Father Moore asked us to do, we did. One time, we took all the first graders to the beach,” she remembered. “No permission slips, no bus; we just used our cars to get to Sea Isle City.
“When Father O’Brien came, he began to slip me a little bit of cash at the end of the week. Then finally he put me on the payroll. He was the best,” she declared. “He always said, ‘We are a family, here at St. Raymond’s.’”
Ella spoke of the awful accident Father O’Brien had when he closed a car door on his eye. “But that never seemed to stop him. Many times he would call me to help him look for his artificial eye – or his hearing aids - when he dropped them.” After Father’s retirement, she and her daughter Elissa visited him at the Villa. “We saw him only a couple of weeks before he died,” she recalled. “And he still called us ‘family.’”
For a quarter of a century, Ella was a member of the Women’s Group at St. Raymond. “We all wore white on one Sunday in May, and we processed outside the church. I remember that Sister Geffries gave the first talk in church on Women’s Day one year. That was something!
“Renee Generette was chair of the Women’s Day Committee, and we raised money every year for the church,” she said.“ That ended when Father Chris came.
“Father Chris,” she said fondly. “He was exactly one week older than my daughter. And he was considered the best homilist in the Philadelphia Archdiocese.
“Deacon Bill and I were the first Eucharistic Ministers at St. Raymond,” Ella said. “But now I just sit in the pews.
“I can’t sing a lick, but I sing every song that they play,” she said.
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