‘I did it for Delco,’ says this tattoo artist after climbing Mount Kilimanjaro with a Delco flag | We The People

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

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

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

After eight days of climbing the highest peak in Africa, Cooper, a Delaware County lifer, stood at the top in negative-20-degree weather with frostbite and sunburn on his nose and tears in his eyes and hoisted the Delco flag — which proudly hangs on houses across Delaware County — as his friend took a photo.

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

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

“You can leave Delco, but you can’t take the Delco out of you,” Cooper said.

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

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

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

“And I needed to know why,” he said. “Everybody told me I was wasting my time and I’d never be able to make a living and survive off of art. Now I tattoo those people and I make a great living.”

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

“Not jail upstate, like northern Pennsylvania,” he said.

Cooper perfected his style in several area tattoo shops and in 2008 opened his own, Olde Media Tattoo, a spellbinding space on Providence Road that’s decorated with everything from a life-size Star Wars Snaggletooth to a disembodied head from the extraterrestrial in Alien.

Though 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 steer people away from those mistakes,” he said.

His mainstay of clients 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 Eagles 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 a 21-year-old daughter, Shelby, can be found juggling and stilt-walking around the region at parades, weddings, and corporate events.

“And I go lumbering around on stilts in the streets at 12 or 1 in the morning because I know there’s kids out there partying and that’s not what you expect to run into,” he said.

An avid Star Wars fan, Cooper is also a member of the 501st Legion, a volunteer organization of fans with approved costumes, particularly stormtrooper uniforms, who attend Star Wars-related functions and charity events. Cooper, who plays everyone from a 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 nonprofit events.

“The only thing we don’t do is travel through space and shoot lasers — yet,” he said.

Cooper is such a massive 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 in the Imperial Academy.

“And I told her Star Wars will be an important aspect of your life,” he said. “And we live it now.”

Since going to space is not an option for Cooper, he figured the closest he could get would be hiking to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro, the tallest free-standing mountain in the world at 19,340 feet. He did consider Mount Everest briefly, but physically and financially, Kilimanjaro was more attainable.

“I think I wanted a new perspective; I wanted do something that was a little bit dangerous and a lot a bit adventurous,” Cooper said. “My life is like one gigantic crazy story, and this kind of fell right in line with that.”

In September 2019, Cooper and his friend, Marty Miller, decided to spend the remainder of that year and all of 2020 training for a climb up Mount Kilimanjaro they planned to do in January 2021.

Little did Cooper know just how much time he’d have to train. When the pandemic and quarantine hit, he had to shut down 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 newly found free time, Cooper and Miller often hiked 13 to 16 miles a day with 50 to 60 pounds of weight on their backs in preparation for the climb.

“I’m going to say we didn’t train enough,” Cooper said. “You can’t train for the high-altitude sickness.”

When their first flight to Tanzania in January 2021 was canceled, they rescheduled for Sept. 5. While that flight did take off, the anxiety of needing to pass a COVID-19 test every step of the way drowned out their anticipation.

“There was never that excitement of ‘Yay, we’re going to go do this!,’ ” Cooper said. “It was like ‘Man, I hope we can make it back.’ ”

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

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

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

“Every time you step, your feet would vibrate 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 coming back home.”

In the times he wanted to quit, he thought of the Delco flag he was carrying, he said.

“That kept me going, that gave me the final push,” Cooper said. “Delco was telling me I have to.”

And he did it. For Delco.

One night after he’d returned and posted the Delco flag photo to Facebook, Cooper walked into Zac’s Hamburgers with his mask on and heard people at a table talking about his picture.

“They said ‘Did you see it?’ And I said ‘That was me,’ ” Cooper recalled. “I’d rather be Delco-famous than world-famous. They’re honest true people. There’s not too much fake. They’ll let you know when you suck, but they forgive it, too, in their own way.”

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