In mid-June 2010 the Los Angeles Times ran a feature on Barbara “Cutie” Cooper, 93, and her husband of 72 years, Harry “Pop Pop” Cooper, who were running a blog called The-OGs.com — short for Original Grandparents — out of their Boyle Heights retirement community. The piece was small, warm, and turned out to be the start of a much larger second act for the Coopers.
Then
The Coopers were Jewish holdouts who had stayed in Boyle Heights as the neighborhood’s demographics had shifted decades earlier. Their granddaughter Kim and producer Jocelyn helped them run the blog, which included recurring features like “PopPop’s Adventure Corner,” in which Harry encountered modern technology with mild bewilderment — calling his iPod a “music box” — and “Ask Grandma Anything,” in which Cutie dispensed style advice while wearing leggings the retirement-home dining room had ruled too sexy.
The LA Times piece quoted them on time travel (“it’s possible”), on lesbians (“just do your thing”), and on Michael Jackson (“He was a very unhappy young man who didn’t know if he was fish or fowl”). The blog had picked up thousands of fans across the world. The original FishbowlLA framing was a straight pickup of the LAT profile — Matthew Fleischer was flagging it for the LA-media-and-internet-culture readership that overlapped the Coopers’ demographic almost not at all.
Now
The Coopers became a small media franchise in the years that followed. Cutie and Pop Pop’s book Fall in Love for Life: Inspiration from a 73-Year Marriage, drawing on their blog material, was published by Chronicle Books in 2014. The couple did the morning-show circuit, appeared on multiple national broadcasts, and were profiled at length by outlets that had not noticed them when the LA Times piece originally ran.
Harry “Pop Pop” Cooper died in 2017 at the age of 100, with 79 years of marriage on the record. Barbara “Cutie” Cooper continued to publish from the Boyle Heights retirement home, posted intermittently on the blog, and gave interviews about the long marriage well into her late nineties. The-OGs.com remained online through the 2020s.
The 2010 LA Times profile — which Matthew Fleischer correctly identified as the kind of piece local-paper feature desks were uniquely positioned to produce — turned out to be the largest single boost in the Coopers’ eventual book trajectory. The broader category of nonagenarian bloggers has not exactly become a content vertical, but the underlying observation that hyperlocal LA blogging had become a real cultural form in 2010 turned out to be exactly right; LAist, Crosstown LA, The Eastsider, and a dozen smaller properties came up in the wake.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine: June 2010 snapshot