Olde Media Tattoo owner Roddie Cooper says he climbed Mount Kilimanjaro ‘for Delco’

Meet Roddie Cooper, a stilt walker, “Star Wars” stormtrooper, and tattoo artist who climbed Mount Kilimanjaro last year for the express purpose of piloting a Delaware county (Delco!) flag on top of the world.

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The first thing Roddie Cooper packed for his Mount Kilimanjaro climb in Tanzania last year wasn’t his clothes or hiking gear. It was a brand new Delco flag, still in its packaging.

“We have other Delco flags, but I didn’t want them damaged by the sun,” he said. “And the first time he hit the air, I wanted him to be up there.”

After eight days of climbing Africa’s highest peak, Cooper, a lifer from Delaware County, stood at the summit in negative 20-degree weather with frostbite and sunburn to his nose and jaws. tears in his eyes and hoisted the Delco Flag – who hangs proudly from homes across Delaware County – as his friend snaps a photo.

“I didn’t do it for likes or for any notoriety – I did it for Delco,” Cooper, 41, said. “I wanted people to know Delaware County was here.”

When Olde Media Tattoo’s longtime owner Cooper returned and posted the photo, it was shared on several Delco Facebook pages. It went viral and the photo was even turned into memes, including one captioned: “When you travel to Tanzania and conquer Mount Kilimanjaro but you’re still Delco AF.”

“You can leave Delco, but you can’t get rid of Delco,” Cooper said.

Born and raised in Ridley Park and currently living in Ridley (“There is a difference,” he pointed out), Cooper was the first generation of his family born in Delco, after his relatives left Chester County .

“In my family tree, I’m the lowest leaf, but I’m the strongest leaf because I’m the only one from Delco,” he said.

Cooper, who grew up playing flash tag at night and skating on Lake Ridley, was drawn to art at a young age and became interested in tattooing because “it seemed like a thing that people didn’t didn’t want you to do”.

“And I needed to know why,” he said. “Everyone told me that I was wasting my time and that I could never make a living and survive through art. Now I tattoo these people and make a good living.

After graduating from Ridley High in 2000, Cooper attended Hussian College in Center City for two years before leaving for an “upstate” tattoo apprenticeship.

“No jail upstate, like northern Pennsylvania,” he said.

Cooper honed his style at several area tattoo shops and in 2008 opened his own, Olde Media Tattoo, a bewitching space on Providence Road that’s decorated with everything from a life-size tattoo star wars Snaggletooth with a disembodied head from the alien in Extraterrestrial.

Although he can tattoo anything, anywhere (“I say if I can pinch it, I can tattoo it”), Cooper is best known for his cover-up work, “fixing people’s mistakes and trying to keep people away from those mistakes,” he said.

His mainstay of customers is from Delco, and yes, he’s done everything from Wawa to Pabst Blue Ribbon tats for his people. When the Eagles won the Super Bowl in 2018, he and his employees did nothing but Eagle tattoos for two straight months.

“It was all Dilly Dilly, Philly Philly and Super Bowl trophies,” he said.

When he’s not tattooing, Cooper, who has 21-year-old daughter Shelby, juggles and walks on stilts in the area at parades, weddings and corporate events.

“And I’ll be hanging out on stilts in the streets at 12 or 1 a.m. because I know there are kids partying and it’s not what you expect,” he said. he declares.

A fan star wars fan, Cooper is also a member of the 501st Legion, a volunteer fan organization with approved costumes, specifically stormtrooper uniforms, who attend star wars-related functions and charitable events. Cooper, who plays everyone from stormtrooper to Boba Fett, makes all of his own costumes.

Instead of cosplay, Cooper said the 501st Legion — which has more than 177 members in eastern Pennsylvania alone — is considered cause-play because they volunteer to visit children’s hospitals or help out at non-profit events.

“The only thing we’re not doing is space travel and shooting lasers – yet,” he said.

Cooper is so huge star wars fan that when he met his wife of 13 years, Kim, on a blind date at Bennigan’s, he told her he was a cadet at the Imperial Academy.

“And I told him star wars will be an important aspect of your life,” he said. “And we are living it now.”

Since going to space isn’t an option for Cooper, he figured the closest he could get would be to hike to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro, the tallest freestanding mountain in the world at 19 340 feet. He briefly considered Mount Everest, but physically and financially Kilimanjaro was more accessible.

“I think I wanted a new perspective; I wanted to do something that was a little bit dangerous and a lot more adventurous,” Cooper said. “My life is like one gigantic crazy story, and that kind of stuff fit that perfectly.”

In September 2019, Cooper and his friend, Marty Miller, decided to spend the rest of this year and all of 2020 training for an ascent of Mount Kilimanjaro which they were planning to do in January 2021.

Cooper didn’t know how long it would take him to train. When the pandemic and quarantine hit, he had to close Olde Media Tattoo for 188 days. He was able to keep his business alive by delivering food for DoorDash and because customers paid him for future tattoos they wanted to get once quarantine restrictions were lifted.

In their new free time, Cooper and Miller would often hike 13 to 16 miles a day with 50 to 60 pounds of weight on their backs in preparation for the climb.

“I’ll say we haven’t practiced enough,” Cooper said. “You can’t train for high altitude sickness.”

When their first flight to Tanzania in January 2021 was cancelled, they rescheduled to September 5. Although that flight took off, the anxiety of having to take a COVID-19 test every step of the way drowned out their anticipation.

“There was never this excitement of, ‘Yay, we’re gonna do this!’,” Cooper said. “It was like, ‘Man, I hope we can come back.’ ”

It took Cooper and Miller eight days to climb the 42-mile Lemosho route of Mount Kilimanjaro with two guides and eight porters. At night, temperatures dropped into the negative teens and 20s.

“If you kept your woodcutter outside of your tent, it would freeze,” Cooper said.

But the most difficult was the altitude sickness. After the fourth day, Cooper couldn’t feel anything but tingling from his knees to his toes and from his elbows to his fingers.

“Every time you took a step, your feet vibrated and you couldn’t feel your hands,” he said. “I knew every step forward I took was going to be harder, but it was also one step closer to going home.”

Back when he wanted to quit, he was thinking about the Delco flag he was carrying, he said.

“It kept me going, it gave me the final momentum,” Cooper said. “Delco was telling me I had to do it.”

And he did. For Delco.

One night after he returned and posted the Delco flag photo on Facebook, Cooper walked into Zac’s burger joint with his mask on and overheard people at a table talking about his photo.

“They said ‘Have you seen it?’ And I said, ‘That was me,” Cooper recalled. “I’d rather be Delco famous than world famous. They’re real, honest people. There aren’t too many fakes. They’ll let you know when you’re no one, but they will forgive him too, in their own way.

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