8/13/09 ~ 12/26/02
Albert John Cope, career Foreign Service officer and Consul General, retired, passed from this life on Dec. 26, 2002, in Tacoma, Washington, in his ninety-third year.
He was born in Salt Lake City on August 13, 1909 to Albert J. and Ethel Ludlow Cope. He married his wife of 68 years, Echo Holmgren Cope, of Bear River City, Utah, in Stuttgart, Germany, with the marriage solemnized June 8, 1937 in the Salt Lake LDS Temple.
In addition to his wife, he is survived by son John G. Cope, MD and wife Anne Rose, of Albuquerque, NM; daughter Susan Gilmour and husband David of Tacoma, WA; grandchildren Ben Cope and wife Gretchen, Steven Cope, Andrew Gilmour and Teja
Gilmour, and great-granddaughter Olivia Cope, brothers Wesson, William, and Alan Cope, and sister Helen Cope Hanes.
He attended West High School, University of Utah, and studied abroad. He served an LDS mission in Germany and Switzerland from 1930 to 1933. He entered the American Foreign Service in 1934. Until his retirement in 1969 he was assigned to posts in Germany, Portugal, Mexico, Cuba, Trieste (Italy), Trinidad, British Guiana and Spain. At the State Department in Washington, D.C. he served in the Intelligence Division and later as officer-in-charge of Argentine and Uruguayan affairs. In Trieste he served as Assistant Political Advisor to the Anglo-American military government of the Free Territory of Trieste.
He will be remembered for his keen wit, the genuine interest he showed in everyone he met, for being a loyal and enthusiastic representative of his country in foreign lands, and for being a loving and generous husband and father.
Funeral services will be held at 2 p.m. on Friday, January 3, in the chapel at Wasatch Lawn Cemetery.