Born on May 7 in 1901, Gary Cooper

Gary Cooper was born Frank James Cooper on May 7, 1901 in Helena, Montana.

It's Gary Cooper all morning and afternoon on TCM Thursday, and I've decided to join in the celebration with an all-Gary Cooper edition of the Classic Movie Daily. While I limit the Daily posts to photos and postcards that aren't displayed elsewhere in any of the site galleries, if you'd like a daylong stream of Gary Cooper trading card images (like the ones shown in this note) then this is a good morning to head over and press "Like" on my Facebook page.

I've already scheduled 11 different Cooper images to post to the page hourly beginning at 7:25 am ET, and depending upon the response I'll set up another half dozen or so to post through my regular Facebook sign-off time of about 2:30 am. Links to a couple of Cooper-relevant Immortal Ephemera posts will be seeded into that feed throughout the day as well.

Turner Classic Movies is playing seven Gary Cooper films beginning at 6:00 am Thursday morning and running for fourteen hours until the 8:00 pm "Disaster Films" theme take over. This year's Gary Cooper birthday marathon consists entirely of movies from the 1940s and '50s. The schedule is as follows:

6:00 am ET - The Hanging Tree (1959); 8:00 am - Man of the West (1958); 9:45 am - Love in the Afternoon (1957); 12:00 pm - Springfield Rifle (1952); 1:45 pm - Bright Leaf (1950); 3:45 pm - The Fountainhead (1949); 5:45 pm - The Pride of the Yankees (1942).

Well, at least Coop gets younger as the day progresses!

Since I tend to write about movies from a slightly earlier period, I've only covered one of the titles TCM is playing on Thursday, Bright Leaf, but other reviews on the site featuring Gary Cooper include Wings (1927), City Streets (1931), and Devil and the Deep (1932). Coop also shows up in one of my post about Shirley Temple's rise to stardom for his role in Now and Forever (1934), and I did cover him in one additional later title that isn't on today's TCM schedule, the MGM anthology film It's a Big Country (1951).

But my favorite Gary Cooper post on the site is THIS ONE where I looked at his rise to stardom through his hometown Helena, Montana newspapers—be sure to scroll down on this one to see the rare political cartoon signed Frank Cooper that I dug out of a 1924 edition of the Helena Daily Independent.

Classic Movie Daily subscribers, enjoy the handful of Gary Cooper images that follow; Like me on Facebook to see even more throughout the day; and enjoy the movies playing on TCM today!