FOLKERT Kuipers from Akkrum, the Netherlands, better known in America as Frank Cooper, was the man of the Big Store in Manhattan, the largest store in the world.
The building is still there, the size of an entire block between 18th and 19th Streets on Sixth Avenue, designated a monument. TJ Maxx and Marshalls, among others, now fill it. But at the turn of the last century, an average of 180,000 customers walked into Siegel & Cooper’s Big Store every day. Once, when Folkert visited Akkrum, he asked Dad Kuipers, who was a barrel maker by trade, a cooper, how much he earned. Dad said: 2500 guilders a year, boy. And the boy replied: that’s my turnover every other five minutes.
It was not in order to boast, because that would be a sin in the eyes of the Kuipers family. But it was an illustration of the differences between Friesland and America. Folkert was the eleventh child of father Willem and mother Ytje, and from an early age he wanted to know everything he could find in the library about America. Attempts by father to make a menswear salesman out of him failed. In 1866 Folkert took the boat from Harlingen via Hull to New York, he was 22 and changed his name to Frank Cooper.
Together with associate Henry Siegel, he opened Chicago’s largest department store. Ten percent of his staff were Dutch immigrants.
THE BIG Store in New York followed soon after, in a huge 7-acre building they had themselves designed, constructed mostly of steel, “the safest store in all of New York,” because it couldn’t catch fire. Frank Cooper was the sales genius. Viewing days when those who came to view were not allowed to buy anything, followed by a sales day that made Black Fridays pale in comparison: 150,000 customers who bought everything there was to be bought, the first time at the cost of sixteen seriously injured folks. On regular days the store had 3,000 staff, during the Christmas season 7,000, plus a thousand delivery people.
Frank Cooper aka Folkert Kuipers from Akkrum was once an absolute celebrity in America who continued to love Friesland all his life. Therefore, he donated a bunch of retirement homes to Akkrum. They are still there, and in the yard he and his wife have their own mausoleum. Frank and Antoinette Kuipers both rest in what is locally known as Coopersburg.
The mausoleum in Akkrum for Frank and Antoinette Cooper / Kuipers.
