“I was a peddler, a con artist, a vinegar man,” he says, recalling years of relentless travel as a seed salesman. “If you didn’t get ’em with your BS, you got ’em with your fancy footwork.”
Now, Cope is just trying to stay put. He and 400 of his neighbors in the mobile home park await the outcome of a frantic effort by one of America’s richest cities to preserve what is, by far, its poorest neighborhood. For the past several months, city and county officials have conducted public hearings on the park’s possible closure that had more feel-good endings than a Frank Capra movie.