Iowa Veterans Home Activities Assistant Jim Coppoc, an Army veteran himself, stands in front of the Ulery Christmas tree and strums a chord on his acoustic guitar on Dec. 12. Coppoc – who also serves as Ripley United Church of Christ’s lay minister in Traer – works with residents in the memory care building and focuses on meeting their “social, cognitive, emotional and spiritual” needs through music. PHOTO BY ROBERT MAHARRY

MARSHALLTOWN – Jim Coppoc’s life has taken him in several seemingly discordant directions, but his passions have always guided him along the way.

The new musically focused activities assistant in the Ulery memory care unit at the Iowa Veterans Home, who also pastors Ripley United Church of Christ in Traer in his spare time, served in the U.S. Army before spending close to 20 years in academia and getting several books of poetry and nonfiction published in the process. After experiencing something of a mid-life crisis and struggling to determine his next move, Coppoc, who grew up moving around “every state on Interstate 35” before graduating from Charles City High School, turned back to his roots.

“It’s been a weird journey. I grew up in nursing homes. My mom was a nursing home administrator. We moved a lot because my mom was an administrator. Her company moved her to homes that were failing, and it was her job to turn them around,” he said. “So I became a CNA – first grown up job. Well, I wasn’t even a grown up. I was in high school.”

After earning degrees in psychology and literature from Buena Vista University, Coppoc originally tried his hand at youth counseling but decided he didn’t have the lived experience to handle the burnout. He quit and instead got master’s degrees in literature and creative writing and an MFA in spoken word poetry, teaching at Iowa State University for 16 years and publishing nonfiction and a few plays before again concluding that it was time for something new.

“I wanted to do something where I was more directly useful to people,” he said. “I decided on a career change, and it took me a while to figure out what I wanted to do. I went back to working with kids, special ed. I worked in a psych ward in a hospital. I was a social work program director here in Marshalltown at Center Associates.”

During that six to seven year period, he completed another degree in leadership focused on trauma-informed care. Coppoc said theology has always been a key component in his written work, and after he was called in to Ripley on a temporary pulpit supply basis a few years ago, he connected with the congregation so well that he kept coming back until they offered him a contract in October of 2022.

“So if you put all of those things together like a little jigsaw — grew up in nursing homes, has a psych degree, has an MFA that’s close to music, did trauma-informed care, eventually it makes sense, but my life doesn’t make sense any other way,” he said. “It’s a lot of disparate threads.”

While Coppoc was at Center Associates leading social work programs for people below the poverty line with serious mental illness, he heard about the opportunity at IVH through a coworker and decided to throw his hat in the ring. The job required credentialing, an interview and an audition that constituted playing an instrument and singing.

“And I had to offer context for why that’s useful for people,” he said.

Coppoc downplayed his own skills as a musician but said he can handle guitar and bass while “faking” piano because he knows chords and has a good sense of rhythm. He also dabbles in other random instruments like the Irish whistle, and he loves to mix and produce for other musicians as well, even hosting a recurring summer concert series on the Ripley parsonage lawn.

For the last four months or so at IVH, he’s put his talents to work in various ways: he recently got a tuba fixed for a resident who had previously played professionally, and he’s also been helping a purple heart WWII veteran and former professional drummer — one of just four who served in that conflict still living at the facility — reignite his longtime passion.

“Really, my job is about meeting people’s social and cognitive and emotional and spiritual needs,” Coppoc said. “The building that we’re sitting in right now is all memory care, and it has eight households. I go to each of those eight households twice a week. I direct a choir. We are starting up an acoustic jam next month… Most of my job is seeing where people are in their process in their lives and their health and trying to meet needs.”

For example, if a resident feels the need to reminisce, they can talk through a specific song, where they were when they heard it, what genres they like and what they sang with their children in the car. He can also play relaxing music, and a hymn sing is available for residents in need of spiritual care.

“Activities are not therapy, but it is a kind of treatment. It helps keep people active and engaged and have that process memory of how to sing, how to play music, how to keep a rhythm,” Coppoc said.

His boss, IVH Activities Specialist Supervisor Sierra Augspurger, schedules larger events, and Coppoc schedules about four small group events per day with individual interventions squeezed in between them. He was supposed to play music before last Saturday’s Wreaths Across America event, but it got postponed due to the expected inclement weather.

“Jim is a great person to have at the Iowa Veterans Home. He is always smiling, has such a positive attitude and goes above and beyond to make our residents happy,” Augspurger said. “Jim provides therapeutic activities centered around music. Music gives our residents an emotional connection through reminiscing over the years. It brings opportunities for physical movement as they tap their foot/hand along to the beat or shake a tambourine. It provides a sense of community as they gather together. Music is something that stays with a person their whole life. There is a lot of value that music can bring to our residents, and we are so fortunate to have Jim here to provide that for them.”

Nonetheless, Coppoc is excited about what his future will hold at IVH working with people who have already made such a profound impact on him. In another full circle moment, he spoke of his own mother, who is now living in a Minnesota nursing home where she once interned.

“Music is a whole brain activity, so some part of their brain can latch onto it. I look for ways to engage people where they are. If they can’t remember words – like my mom has no language left, she has frontotemporal dementia – they can remember emotions… You can play music for her, and she will feel the feelings she felt the first time she heard it in high school even if she has no words left to talk it through. She might not even know where she is,” he said. “But she can feel the feelings. She can engage with her body. She still has rhythm, so like the language centers of her brain are affected, but there are other parts that music can get into. And it’s the same with all 100 some residents of this building… Brains are amazing, and there are so many pathways in and out that music can find a way.”