The People

The ones who were there.

History is made by people, not events. Some of the people who made Cooper Do-nuts what it was have names we know. Others are still shadows. We are still looking.

The Founder

Jack Evans

Founder & Owner

Jack Evans came to California from a farm in Chicago during the Great Depression. He became a chef, opened two cafeterias in downtown Los Angeles, and in 1952 purchased the rights to the Cooper Donuts name from its creator, Richard Cooper, for $50,000.

He built the chain from a single storefront at 215 S Main Street into more than thirty locations across California — always small counters, always affordable, always open. He was known for hiring people who had nowhere else to go: veterans, transients, anyone down on their luck. Police on skid row would send people to Cooper’s when they needed work.

His grandson Keith describes him simply: someone who thought everyone deserved a donut, regardless of who they were. In a city that was actively criminalizing large portions of its own population, that was not a small thing.

Behind the counter

Marge Evans

Co-owner & Designer

Marge Evans designed the Cooper Donuts logo. She took a donut — a circle with a bite out of it — and made the gap into the letter “C.” Clean, clever, the kind of design that looks obvious only after someone has already thought of it.

She also designed the interiors. The counters in every Cooper Donuts location were salmon — her favorite color. More than thirty shops, all with the same salmon counters. If you sat at one in Hollywood, or South Central, or Pacoima, you were sitting at something Marge had decided.

The community

Nancy Valverde

Community Elder  ·  Cooper Do-nuts Regular

Nancy Valverde came of age in a Los Angeles that was hostile to people like her — a gay Latina woman in mid-century America. She found her way to Cooper Do-nuts the same way many did: because it was one of the few places where she felt she belonged.

She became one of the most important voices in the effort to document and preserve this history. In 2023, the City of Los Angeles formally renamed the corner at 2nd and Main “Cooper Do-nuts/Nancy Valverde Square” — a recognition of both the place and the person who never stopped insisting it mattered.

Nancy Valverde also recalled hearing about the 1959 uprising almost immediately after it happened — her lesbian friend from barber school told her: “It was all over town. I wasn’t there in person, but I heard about it right away.” Her testimony is one of the few first-hand accounts that has survived.

A fixture

Blanche

Regular  ·  Artist

Blanche was deaf and mute. She was also one of the most beloved regulars at Cooper Donuts — so much a part of the place that the Evans family created small jobs for her whenever they could. She wasn’t tolerated. She was included.

She was also an artist. At some point she drew a cartoon — a figure at the counter, a donut, a cup of coffee, a caption that read: “All this for a dime?” The Evans family hung it at the main headquarters, where it stayed for years.

It is a small piece of evidence of what Cooper Do-nuts actually was: a place where someone like Blanche could become part of the furniture, leave something behind, and be remembered. We don’t know Blanche’s last name. We’re working on it.

A witness

John Rechy

Author  ·  City of Night

John Rechy’s 1963 novel City of Night contains the most widely cited account of the 1959 uprising at Cooper Do-nuts. Rechy was a gay Chicano writer who moved through the same late-night world of downtown Los Angeles that the shop inhabited. His novel is fiction — but it draws directly on his own experience.

The question of how much City of Night reflects documented history versus literary memory is one this foundation takes seriously. Rechy’s account is evidence. It is not, by itself, a record. Understanding the difference — and what fills the gap between them — is part of what we’re working to establish.

Still searching

There are names we don’t have yet.

We know that Cooper Do-nuts was full of people. We know that many of them came back night after night. We don’t know all of their names, and many of their stories have never been written down. If you were there — or if someone you knew was there — we want to hear from you.