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12 Legends: Norman Cooper
1 Feb, 2008 By: Norman Cooper Pest Management ProfessionalIn 1954, Pest Management Professional and the National Pest Management Association (NPMA) already were robust 21-year-olds (then known as Pest Control and the National Pest Control Association, respectively). I begin with 1954 because it's the year I received my honorable discharge from the U.S. Army after having served in the Korean Conflict.
Norman Cooper
I entered the professional pest management field in 1954 because it met my rudimentary entrepreneurial requirements: an opportunity to start my own business with my accumulated assets (less than $200) and with my dear wife, Marilyn, who was holding down a full-time job while I attended college at night under the G.I. Bill. I grossed $31 my first month on the job as a PMP, so naturally I could only go uphill from there.
At that time, dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane (DDT) was incredibly effective against bed bugs. Even in New York, the country's most populous city — despite a steady influx of immigrants (legal and illegal) added to 1 million tourists per day — bed bugs had become for all intents and purposes extinct. Shortly thereafter, chlordane arrived as pest management's silver bullet — not only for the control of termites, but for ants and cockroaches, too.
In those early days, we used secret formulas, mixing a little bit of this with a little bit of that. Initially, there were few environmental concerns. If a 1-percent dilution provided good results and long-term residual effects, then wasn't 5 percent five times better? This was before the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was founded. The New York City Health Department ordinances required applicants to be at least 21 years of age, literate and little else.
Was it any wonder, then, that an exterminator's status wasn't very high on the public image scale? Bars and shops often paid $4 per month for service. It wasn't totally with tongue-in-cheek that one operator reported at a meeting that he had experienced a good week — "five or six new $5-per-month accounts and a few more smaller ones."
LEARNING FROM THE BEST
I attended my first national convention, held in New York, in 1964. It was there that I experienced a personal epiphany.
I met industry professionals from every part of the country and was blown away not only by their breadth of knowledge and success, but also their friendliness, camaraderie and generosity in sharing their business expertise.
To salute just a few of my many industry supporters, in succeeding years I learned a great deal from Paul Adams, John Cook, and fellow PMP Hall of Famers Harry Katz and Lee Truman — as did hundreds of other grateful PMPs.
FIGHTING BACK
Radical environmentalists used political pressure in the late '70s and early '80s to introduce legislation that would severely restrict or ban many pesticides.
While the Love Canal and Times Beach debacles made headlines, our industry was countering with scientific facts and the rationale of a very slight probability of risk versus great health benefits.
Then the infamous termiticide misuse situation on Long Island, N.Y., occurred in April 1983. This, in turn, triggered the New York Daily News' "The House That Died of Poison" headline and weeks of negative front-page stories worldwide.
Emotion overcame reason and logic, and we became victims to politics. Chlordane (which, by the way, was not the termiticide used in the tragedy) subsequently was banned by the EPA. It was a bitter loss, but the industry learned from these setbacks. Several years later, technology provided new anti-termite weapons, baiting among them.
In the early 1990s, NPMA's then-leaders realized that trying to stop the environmental bandwagon would be futile. Instead, as an association, we recast the industry's image to focus on its many contributions that benefit the environment, and our role in protection of the public's health, comfort and property.
Looking back, I'm proud to say we truly have evolved into "guardians of the environment."
You can reach Cooper, president of Norman Cooper Associates, a Rye, N.Y.-based mergers-and acquisitions consultancy, at 914-698-8659 or e-mail normcooper@verizon.net.
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