most famous acts was "Fun in a Barber Shop". This act involved five different puppet characters where Cooper portrayed each one in different voices. It was a scene that took place in a barbershop for whites with black employees. Cooper operated all five dummies and the projection of six voices. The extra voice was his, as he also had a role in the performance. In this scene, he multitasked by one of the dummies "cut the customer's hair" with his hands while using his feet to operate the other dummies. Two of the dummies were customers who talked while waiting their turn as well as a manicurist who sang while doing the fifth dummy's nails. The White Rats Cooper's break into the vaudeville circuit came as a result of a white vaudeville union's strike in 1901. The White Rats, the notorious name for the white vaudeville union, was facing administrative issues where performers could not reach any sort of negotiation with their managers in the heavily monopolized business. In the meantime, Cooper ignored the strike and in the desperate need for talent during the strike, he became a fixture on the vaudeville circuit. This led to performances on many radio shows throughout the rest of his life including a weekly performances while touring with the troupe "The Major Bowes Original Amateur Hour". Father Quinn’s entertainers During the 1920s, Cooper was the lead performer in a group of five performers called Father Quinn’s Entertainers. Throughout this decade, they toured Catholic churches in the United States. By the 1930s, a decline in the popularity of Vaudeville occurred. After twenty years of performing in clubs, halls, and theaters, Cooper began to tour alone with his dummy named Sam Jackson. For the rest of his career, he and Sam provided entertainment to children in the homes of wealthy patrons and in the hospitals of New York City. In 1960, at the age of 86, Cooper retired from show business. Sam Jackson Through the later part of his vaudeville days in the 1930s, parts of Cooper's act featured his dummy Sam Jackson. Often claiming Sam was a "cousin" of Charlie McCarthy, the famous dummy of Edgar Bergen, background research performed as part of a PBS series discovered that both McCarthy and Jackson were made by Theodore Mack, a prominent puppet maker from Chicago. The puppet also had a variety of fairly large features such as